https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRTF36xPaJU&feature=youtu.be

This project is the culmination of a semester’s worth of work. I do not mean that I worked on it all semester. What I mean is, after six weeks of 360 shoots, VR demos, and messing around on the bleeding edge of the field with both software and hardware, I knew what I could do with the resources available to me. More importantly, I knew what I wanted to do with those limitations in mind.

First, a little background to help you understand how this project was conceptualized: I am in the fourth and final year of my college career, and during all four of those years I have been a member of Orange Appeal, Syracuse University’s original all-male a cappella group. I knew almost immediately I wanted to use my a cappella group in a 360 project as a way to improve my skills and promote the group, but I was not sure how I would do it until the final project rolled around.

I set out to take the audience on a journey to see how an Orange Appeal song is learned then and developed into a full-blown performance. The video was going to show the three stages of song development - learning around the piano, rehearsing in a circle/practicing choreography, and then live on stage for an audience. However, due to performance dates and the group’s schedule, I had to show three different songs in three different stages of development instead of one song going through the whole process.

The project shifted from “the story of a song’s process” to “the story of the group’s process,” but the same elements are there. Viewers are given a chance to see what an Orange Appeal rehearsal looks like from the inside and then given a seat in the audience to see Orange Appeal live and in uniform. It allows viewers the chance to sit in the audience during an Orange Appeal show while also offering a unique, never-before-seen look at how the group functions behind the scenes.

As far as production is concerned, the only real problem was exporting and rendering. The sheer size of the files with which I was working made exporting take 30 to 45 minutes (when the clips themselves were never longer than one minute). That meant if I overlooked a “ghosting” issue in Autopano, I had to go back and adjust the file and re-export it. That may sound simple enough, but the problem was that I would not be able to tell if my edits made the ghosting better or instead added a new stitching problem until the export finished.

As part of my independent learning assignment, I took an Adobe AfterEffects course on Lynda.com and used what I learned to add an opening credits sequence to the video (more about that here). But in order to do that, I had to switch computers because the one in the lab where I had been working had an outdated version of the Creative Cloud and it would not let me use AfterEffects for whatever reason. When I opened my Premiere project on the new computer to add my new credits sequence, I found I had to re-render the entire project because I had been using an older version of Premiere previously and my new computer needed to update the project file (and I could not go back to the old computer because someone else had taken it, which added another hour and a half to my total rendering time).

If export and rendering time was halved for Autopano and Premiere, I could have done all of post-production in no more than three hours. Unfortunately, the tech just is not quite there yet. And when I shot my live performance, the theater was so dark that it messed up the auto-stitching and I had to MacGyver one of the frames into place. Most frustratingly, I could not add a script to AfterEffects that would have allowed me to write credits/watermarks in 360 degrees due to Syracuse’s software installation rules. But all in all, the project came out the other side as an exciting and engaging look at how Orange Appeal gets stuff done