Some Immersive 3D Action Coming Your Way
There’s been some buzz this week about the fact that Justin Lin, the director of the upcoming Star Trek Beyond (and four Fast and Furious films) just rolled out a 360-degree interactive sci-fi film for the Google Spotlight platform. This was no small technical feat; it was a collaboration between Lin’s Bullitt production company, VFX house The Mill, and Google ATAP. It was shot using a custom-made, 360-degree rig using four Epic Red Dragon cameras and took 13-months, 200 terabytes of data, and 15 million rendered frames to shoot and edit. See some clips further below.
Sorry, It’s Cellphone Only
Stills don’t do justice to the immersive 3D experience…
So why so much expense, effort, and innovation to make an immersive 360-degree movie that people can only watch on their phone? Well, part of it is probably because if you’re creative, driven, and have the money, it would just be FUN. But you can trust that there’s something bigger afoot here. Unless you’ve been hiding under an internet rock, you know that VR is expected to be the “next big thing”, with Sony’s Playstation VR, Facebook’s Oculus, and HTC’s Vive all accepting pre-orders. Given all the dollars being dumped into these ventures, one might reasonably wonder why Google has been pushing its seemingly flimsy and disposable Cardboard platform. Well, as is often the case, Google may actually be doing the smartest thing possible: let other major players do all the heavy lifting with hardware development and platform testing, and in the meantime develop the marketing environment to cash in later. Releasing a mobile-only immersive production by one of the film industry’s hottest directors while other companies create the buzz about VR’s rollout is probably a master-stroke of marketing.
Some Basic Tech Insight
One of the things that makes this film really unique is that no-one had previously used cinema-quality cameras to shoot 360-degree content, so they not only had to build the rig for the $50K+ cameras, they had to develop the software to stitch the images together!
Google Spotlight Stories: The Making of HELP
Here’s a quick “making of”…
