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So one of the formats we've involved with this is the documentary kind of type
piece, where you go out there on location and
you tell the story of someone in another part of the world.
And in this piece, basically, we looked at going to a place in Honduras and
explore this location where charity, basically, brings water to this village.
And we told the story of this Wilhelmina,
and her story before she had water and with water.
And we basically split the world into this kind of two 360 spheres here.
So you're sort of standing in the middle in some moments,
where one-half the scene is without water, one-half the scene is with water.
It's kind of a strange- >> So
is it like you turn left you see the one with water?
You turn right you see the one without- >> That was kind of the idea,
one of the creative ideas we had.
>> And then you can choose where you turn.
>> Yeah, it's not really interactive.
It could be, and we actually pitched it to be, but then it was a bit complex for
the user.
But it's interesting that you're okay with being in these two places at once.
We're not sure that would really work.
And so in Wilhelminia, basically, she had to carry water with her kids
several times a day because for washing, etc., they have to go down.
And it's about 30 to 40 minute walk down to the river.
So you go back up and down the river several times a day, and
you have to make sure the water's clean, etc.
So the main point is, the difference with water is huge.
They get a whole bunch of extra time, kids can go to school, etc.
And I'll show a snippet of the film here.
And this is, again, you have to imagine it wrapped around
you, but- >> They can spend millions of hours a day
collecting water they need for their families.
Together we can give them this time back.
>> So from the point of view of filming, you'll see there's some drone shots.
You'll see there's a number of shots there on the location.
>> [FOREIGN].
>> My name is Wilhelminia Hernandez Hernandez.
I am 55 years old.
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I would go eight times a day to the river,
each time taking about 40 minutes there and back.
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>> That's basically their whole day [LAUGH].
>> Yeah, basically, most of the day.
>> Yeah.
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>> Collecting water was my main job.
The containers I used to carry were very heavy.
At first, I wasn't used to it.
I used to spill a lot of water on the way.
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But so much changed when we got water.
Now we can get up, shower, clean, and cook.
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Washing clothes is much easier.
So the kids, instead of having to help me, they have more time to themselves,
more time to go to school.
Allowing them to go forward not backwards.
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We're all much healthier too.
>> So we kind of got brought into this world.
And I think the power of this VR is you're just immediately there.
And you're like, wow!
Okay, I'm in this village, and it's just like being there, in a sense.
It's quite a powerful thing and this division of the two, before and after,
we think worked pretty well.
It was conveying the whole idea.
The thing is, at the same time, we also, while we're going through this process,
we realize there were some issues with VR that made it
particularly difficult actually to be close to the people, as well.
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And so, I'll just skip on to this couple of issues that we run into.
One of them being that there's no depth of field.
When you're shooting with these cameras, they're very wide-angle cameras.
And so this depth of field means, basically,
that you can keep the background out of focus and have a focus on the foreground.
In this situation, you would put a lot of attention on what is the emotional
content of the expression, and what's going on in the main character?
You know that he's the one you should be looking at.
When everything is in focus, instead, it's very likely that you'll be just looking
around and looking at the doctors walking by, which is kind of neat in a way.
But in a way, it's more difficult to convey sort of the emotional
depth of that story.
And we're showing another example here with this sort of flower.
So it's a strange paradox that you're in this space, but you're actually kind of,
in a way, further away from the space.
Another funny thing is that we discovered this kind of paradox of, you're closer,
but you're further, is a behind the camera issue.
That in a normal film, if you look at a snippet from a classic Hollywood film,
the actor will be on one side while the crew is on the other.
And the crew are all paying attention to the shot.
They're really studying it.
They're giving instructions on what you should do, and
how he should position himself, etc.
And they're monitoring the footage.
On VR, we don't have this opportunity.
In VR, you're kind of jumping in the middle of a river, and
you're adjusting the camera, as you see he's doing here.
[COUGH] As soon as he's got this shot ready, he has to run and
hide into the woods.
And as he goes in with the rest of the crew, behind a rock behind there,
then they kind of yell out.
And the actors can come out and do their scene.
But you can't really tell the actors exactly what to do.
The actors are doing what they've done, but you don't have the same kind of,
you're not able to really get actual expression.
So this is kind of a strange thing about VR being kind of closer in a way, but
more distance in another.
And I have a summary.
Well, we have this quote we really like,
which is that shooting VR is more like setting bear traps.
>> [LAUGH] >> You put something there, and
you hope you get it.
You hope you get something there.
And I did a summary of how I see these kind of 2D versions versus 360 film.
And I think the main point is that we learned that conveying
a story is very different from conveying presence.
So when in normal story, you can really focus on the psychology and
development of the character.
In VR what you're doing is you're almost bringing people to different places where
they can kind of get a sense of what's going on in terms of that situation.
But you can't really tell them exactly what's going on so
a little bit more indirect.
So I think it's almost like different between individual stories versus people's
situations, maybe it's that kind of a general difference in these two.
And yeah, so you learn about this idea of presence which nobody,
I haven't found a really good, precise definition of how you know what that is.
But you kind of know what it is when you experience it in a funny way.
Another ad example.
I mean, this is a very well produced ad.
I think it's kind of the best, I think, of the work we've done in terms of technique,
post production technique.
And it was done for the car companies staffed with these companies.
And this was targeted to a car show where the car will be there, and people would be
sitting on these chairs, to actually move them around as they're watching the video.
So in a way, some of the dramatic motion that might make you feel a little bit
uneasy while you're watching the film.
Actually, in a chair these kind of strong motions can actually work even better.
It's funny.
When you're shooting for a 4D chair, or for something that'll move you around for
a ride, it's actually almost better to move the camera a little bit too much.
Because the change in the position of the chair will then-
>> Match, yeah.
>> Match and make you feel more into the action, okay.
I'll show some of the video, I may not show all of it.
But the idea is we just kind of follow through Barcelona.
And we follow this car.
I might comment on some of the shots, so when we go through here's a drone shot.
And we're approaching this man with this
strange kind of water flying device kind of thing.
>> That looks amazing.
I'd like to try that in VR [LAUGH].
>> Yeah, it's very cool, yeah.
>> Yeah.
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And you see there's this kind of interesting transition.
That transition effect, these effects don't exist for VR.
So you have to invent even your transition effects.
I mean, a cross fade, you can do.
But this is kind of like a motion blur, and you can't get
a normal motion blur because you have to specialize it around the footage.
>> Yeah.
>> And so we had to do a lot of custom work to try to make that work.
It's a whole bunch of different motion blurs all around you, basically.
And always cleaning the action up below you,
especially when the main person is riding on a skateboard with a camera in his hand.
Because that's the only way you can shoot this thing, and it's pretty crazy.
>> Yeah.
>> And you don't see him at all.
You don't get any sense that he's there.
And so it's an interesting, the challenges of these things.
So you go from very small custom designed camera set ups to very big
also custom designed camera set ups with much more heavier cameras.
You'll see a shot coming up soon.
Wait, this one's interesting because the car, Turns left here, boom.
And we go through a restaurant at some point.
You'll see down here, boom.
>> Wow!
>> And we go through this restaurant.
And this, again, tricky.
Because the one big problem with VR is parallax.
So cameras that are close to a subject will see parts of the action in
different ways.
And handling parallax in the shot that's so
close to people in the restaurant was very, very tricky.
He's coming back out.
And I want to just take you through one shot that you'll see just after here.
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So here we're on the roof of a monument in Barcelona.
This is Casa Barcelona.
But basically, the crane is lifting this camera over the action and moving across.
Yeah, it's quiet a tricky shot to do actually with a crane,
because you don't see any crane.
You don't see any of the work that's going on to make the shot happen.
And you go over there [INAUDIBLE].
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>> These people have to, basically, ignore.
>> [LAUGH] >> Yeah, they have to all ignore
you, of course.
>> Yeah.
>> So yeah, this is, I mean, I'll move on just for the matter of time, but yeah.
So we're following this car, and we follow it to the final location.
So yeah, this is just to show one technical shot,
to show the kind of things.
You have all these in cameras and you have to combine them as separate cameras.
And then recreate the sky, and then put it all together, and then tune it, and
then you get final shot.
This process requires a lot of different tools, the post production tools.
There's some tools that you can get actually, online.
They're relatively inexpensive, and simple, and they can do a lot.
But when you get to a certain level, you realize you need to kind of create your
own custom scripts for this kind of stuff.
And we use Nuke for a lot of those things, which is a post production tool for this.
Yeah, that's just a note for
those people that are interested in the post production aspect of it.
Here's a real, I'll show you just a little bit of it.
And it just shows some shots of the kind of things
of the action from a third person.
It's just interesting to see someone use a crane and do it from that shot.
So that whole object needs to be cleaned up out of that shot.
And you can do that partly by taking photographs beforehand,
partly by actually manually going in, and they're painting things.
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Yeah, I think you see this skateboarding shot at some point.
It looks very interesting.
So this is a smaller
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>> And that's moving on the you see.
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>> So basically, to do these kinds of jobs, you need big teams, lots of people,
lots of organization, lots of thinking and discussion about, okay,
what are we going to do here?
What about there?
Yeah, yeah, that's another big crane there.
That's the director of this piece.
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If you don't see him.
Anyhow, I'll move on.
I'll get you some flavor of what it's like to be on set to do this.
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