Nick Gellatly
360 Degree Worlds – Going Full Circle
360-degree cameras, table tennis and a room with no corners.
This week’s session was all about 360-degree photography, and the camera that does it. The idea is simple enough: instead of choosing where to point a camera, you capture everything at once and decide later what the viewer should look at. In practice it means there is nowhere to hide!
Two teams, thirty minutes
We split into two teams and had half an hour to capture footage, playing with angles and perspectives. The brief was to keep clips to around twenty seconds, because 360 files are large and take an age to download. This You Tube video gives an example of the ‘Insta 360’ camera in use:
I haven’t used 3d photography or videography before but have seen some of the (rather bizarre) videos of Francis Bourgeois who has become famous due to his 3d footage of himself running after – and squealing with joy at – trains and railway related material. His close-up, wide-angle filming style has become his signature and launched a remarkable career. He isn’t using 360 cameras on his Grand Tour gig, but the lesson is the same: an odd angle, used with confidence, becomes a style.
Channelling our inner Marty Supreme
For the second experiment we took the cameras outside for a game of table tennis. I’d like to say we were channelling our inner Marty Supreme. In reality the hustle was minimal, the footwork was questionable, and the ball spent more time on the ground than on the table. Katie and Kennedy stitched the footage together, and the result puts you right in the middle of the rally, which is rather more exciting than it was to play.
Into the Igloo
We also visited the Igloo room, an immersive space where footage wraps all the way around you. It’s one thing to drag a 360 video around on a phone screen, and quite another to stand inside it. The edges disappear, and you stop watching and start being somewhere.
Two examples worth watching
We looked at a National Geographic 360 film, which shows how the format can take an audience somewhere most of us could never go ourselves.
The second example, EMPEROR, is something else entirely. It’s an interactive virtual reality story in which you travel with a daughter into the mind of her father, who has aphasia. His inner world is drawn as a hand-sketched, black and white landscape. It uses immersion not for spectacle but for empathy: you are placed inside an experience that words have made hard to share.
What I’m taking from it
My Sedgwick project is built on sound rather than vision, so I won’t be strapping a 360 camera to Crystal Formation (look out for more information about Crystal – coming soon!) just yet. But today was a useful reminder of what immersion is for. EMPEROR doesn’t put you inside a brain to show off the technology. It does it so you understand someone. That’s the test I want every choice in my audio play to pass.
There’s also a practical idea worth keeping in my back pocket. A 360 capture of the mineral gallery could let people who can’t visit the museum stand among the crystals while they listen. Accessibility, with added sparkle.
Our Videos
Katie, Kennedy, Ivanusa, Quinn and myself made the table tennis 360 videos – see the links below for the original videos edited by Katie:
Leave a Reply