Looking back on this project, we would have never through that we would finally see our finished product.
The challenges
- Before we began shooting our 360 video, one of our biggest concerns was conveying our information in an intriguing way to keep the attention of our viewers. We did not want to do a traditional tour as we all personally disliked the idea of having someone talk to a 360 camera for 8 minutes wouldn’t really take advantage of the immersive capabilities
- Filming locations was another one of our concerns. Originally, we planned on going to every single haunted location on campus, however, as we dug deeper we found we had to get filming permissions and we were denied the rights by one of our locations.
- Shooting in 360 itself posed a huge challenge. 360 video literally captures everything so it added a level of difficulty as we had to hide from the camera to set the scene and do effects.
- We also underestimated the difficulty of editing 360 video. While filming we never took into account how stitching would effect our overall final shots.
Solutions
- To combat our first issue we decided to take a more cinematic approach. We had a character led approach but had the character interact with the viewer as much as possible. The 360 camera was used as a vlogging camera to better incorporate it into scenes. It came out as natural as possible which is the look we wanted.
- To solve our filming location problems we made to to plan out scenes using more locations than needed. This allowed flexibility when it came to editing. After we were denied to film in an entire location, we still had several others to fall back on. Additionally, we filled out the proper paper work we needed in advance so that would not become a setback.
- To overcome our 360 filming issue we took many takes. To avoid losing connection one of our actors was in charge of pressing record and hiding the phone.
Pulling off special effects in 360 was accomplished through our technique of taking many takes. It was a very time consuming process and it took us 6 hours to film. The scene in the English lab was one of the most difficult shots as it required a continuous shot. On a normal camera these are hard to execute as so many things can go wrong, the additional of the 360 format made it even worse. The scene in the stacks are the most intricate and took the most time to edit together. Filming in the stacks took almost three hours to shoot. The jump scare required a lot of reshooting but overall, Sooin was able to make it work.
UIUC Ghost Tour 