Gadgetory

hello world welcome we're in the cube from the merge office reporting live following up with our release of Michelle Obama 360 and assuming most of you guys are watching because you had a chance to watch the video and if you have it then you should certainly go to youtube.com slash the merge and check it out because it's it's insane insane is it's pretty pretty great anyway so I'm Tracy Olivarez like the free surface burns video team I am here with real Milson director Earth video Tom Connors senior director that's my my mastermind behind this project and James Brown James BAM our director also photographer who took these stunning portraits of lovely Michelle Obama so we're we're you know we're gonna kind of keep this short and simple we really want to target a lot of questions involving post-production how did we pull this off a lot of our colleagues have been curious about this my friends been texting me since really so this has been curious about this and so this is an opportunity for us to sort of you know step behind the scenes and share with you guys what happened so I think we should just jump into background how how do we conceived this idea how do we conceptualize this idea yeah well yeah well we found out we were gonna do it at CES this year which was a terrible time to find out of it but we threw the idea out there and the White House was very receptive to the idea of us doing this in 360 so we got partnered with a John and some other producers to actually make this in 360 capturing it and then that was kind of the easy part the shooting in physics is not actually that difficult you set the camera down and you turn it on it goes it worked and then the post production side of things was one you know we we really took our time trying to like craft our story and figure out all the sort of creative avenues we wanted to do because three-sixty is a very new type of medium for us to write live in and using it at least for me in the past I've always had trouble with 360 content because it is so far away from the person right I feel like you lose the chance to actually engage like I'm very close to try and James and me right now I can see their face that I can see their expression I can understand exactly what's going on with them but a lot of times in 360 or 7 6 feet away from the camera and you're very very small and you don't get that so a big design thing that we wanted to figure out what this piece is how do we inject that into a 360 and interview in a way that feels natural and seamless and doesn't take you out of it but when it does it is informative and growing the piece absolutely and I want to also state for the record that this is the verge in box media's first 360 project so it was a really ambitious for seditious watch to do 360 when we have such a high-profile subject I believe with right I believe I was I've been I mean Trent we've been trying to do some sort through 60 content for a really long time now and I think the first thing I said talking about it was let's not do it with anything really important so we can learn I'm an easy thing and we didn't do that oh let's do it but I mean the whole thing about this is like you say you can't move the camera and and it all happened so fast and it's the White House and you've got to get that entire crew in that and I mean the it has to be said that the White House were a grown woman just so supportive so easy to work for and you know from the photo shoot side what we were thinking about is how okay it's not enough just to go and stick a 360 camera there we've got to take pictures there's got to be a story about it and so I think from when we were working it out we came up with the the selfie idea we did some tests the White House loved it and we went off to do it but the thing that was so important is we had to do this for real we had to take that orange back to the White House we tried to set it but we had to get that real her real team there and to sort of show the background because otherwise it would look like we shot it on a stearate so from a design standpoint why why the orange it's the verge orange right I mean man it's just you know it's a lovely color it's it's it's warm it's bright its crisp and the the other thing was you know it's this is an opportunity to photograph Michelle Obama the first lady in a way that's never been done before we didn't want this to look like a Good Housekeeping cover or something else this had to be for us we have to own it and what better way to own it is to embed the color of the verge in the very features they're not going to work anywhere else right that's what was so important I think yeah in it I mean seeing mixer truly like a warm summer day but it wasn't it was January and it was free and why if everybody remembers I spent 50 minutes outside of the main security they let me in and they were very nice yeah and thank you for in James just too charming so yes so you know we we came up this idea of shooting it at 360 we came up the idea of you know bringing in our average orange into the White House kind of creating this really cool hip look right so take me through some of some sort of ideas first I guess let's talk about video there you know 360 with motion graphics and animations sounds pretty crazy right imagine that the process of you know how how do you take space and incorporate graphics and so they're not secured you know jarring or you know really wacky how how you know how did you maintain this consistency and look and and flow right silly I think the main sort of idea that I always kind of came up with and I throw credit where credit's due to our past alum Phil Ribeiro who made a series for us called the big future where we had interviewed Bill Gates in a regular interview and he took that interview footage mixed with a little bit of a vo script and made these really beautiful motion graphics that helped take a standard interview and expand it out into this big sort of infographic explainer video on a subject with an interviewer and it was really great it was really inspiring to this piece which was okay can we take that can take that feel and incorporate that into a 360 space taking away sort of that oh you're just in one room and there's only one thing to look at and you get bored after you kind of looked around for a little bit here we've injected things for you to look at as much as it makes sense and actually so talking about process for doing it I'm gonna sift out of miriam a little bit because she was the integral in figuring out all the technical things of this yeah and yeah let's bring up a traffic sign just look at this for a second so get your idea of how the scale of it our main comp has 129 layers all moving around at once so forgive my tiny little laptop of it is creaking a long time uh-huh so what our main like work out workhorse when we did this was the software called metal which allows you to take 2d animations and bring them into the 360 space so if you look at this little phone on the side up here I take off the metal programming it turns it it's hard to see because it's small but it turns it all flat and it will look very strange in the preview player let's back up real fast can you explain how this the idea of what a something called ecto rectangular view is okay so the easiest way to think about it projection is kind of like the classic world map you see where it's got like Greenland supermassive in the top and kind of all the other countries kind of to normal spaced along the equator because what it does is it takes a globe which is a sphere and kind of peels apart the top of the globe and makes it really wide so if you look at like this image of the room we have here you can see the chandelier is massive and all of the production equipment on the bottom is stretched out huge but then whereas if you look at the interview like it's pretty close to being right when you're going here you can snow so if you go in here you can look down and see that it's all right it is little clump and this is a this is a metal thing that's using cameras in After Effects to sort of create an approximation of how that will look once it's all stitched together so the idea is you take that flat image and software you upload it to YouTube Facebook hopefully you can get that send that up to them they will take that and they take that square and then wrap it into a circle through programming and that's what allows you to pan around later yeah and so metal kind of workhorses it and takes 2d objects that you put in that are normally in regular flat and transforms them and warps them so that they have this curve which when you put them into 360 view believe in you you can then turn around and see them and I think that was to me that was like a really surprising thing that it actually you know I think going into this we had anticipated oh man we are going to be editing in 360 this is gonna be a much more complicated process but really it was pretty much the same as editing a 2d process you're still editing in a rectangle it's a two-to-one ratio instead of a you know 16:9 that we're used to but everything else was the same we animate on there and it trans and how you do wipes just translates to 360 so you start to sort of be able to look at that actor rectangular stretched out thing and kind of see how it makes sense in 360 in animating in 360 so it's actually like super fun to put in all these graphics and get to see them in there and then realize that it wasn't actually that difficult to do no I mean because you're basically still editing the same way it's just you have to be a little more conscious about cuts and whatnot because that can feel super jarring yes so that that's not any point did you are can you edit with a headset or is it this is all happen in 2d there are a way to edit is in 2d for sure there are with there are a couple plugins that give you headsets but not for After Effects right now yeah right so in the future I I can't wait to edit in VR editing in viewer is going the best if you give me a keyboard that can subscribe to my chair and a mouse that I can just wirelessly turn all I'd ever do but the funny thing the whole thing with this video is once you put on a headset it completely make sense right I mean when we got into the VR room and put this headset on I mean apart from time time myself in complete knots with the cable of the headset because it kept spinning around all the time it was amazing yeah yeah and that's like part of the design we talked about when we were coming up with the idea for these animations on what they would look like that was something we talked about was like how does the design of these push you in certain directions right because part of 360 is you want to give people the ability to look anywhere they want and follow their intestines anyway and give them things reward them for looking at reward them for checking things out right even the setup of how we set the shot you know we we chose not we wanted to have cameras there to do those cutaways but we also wanted interesting things so if you watch the video I want a slider bouncing back and forth the entire time the entire time and we use that shot once in the piece and we I wasn't like super into the shop but it gives some action to that background right and like staging that out as part of how we conceptualize this whole thing right you want it to be able to look at because we very easily could have taken us out of that room entirely and left you in an empty room actually do you want to explain the crazy cheap we figured out that for this so because cutting is so jarring and obviously this interview is about what 20 minutes long interview them cut down to 10 so there are some cuts and we've hidden them in a bunch of different ways but the easiest way we did it I did was we took just a straight ten minutes of the background of all of us crew hanging out and ended up masking masking it out so that the background never cuts at all we have so you can get to show up more sound effect please actually well this low this might be a good time speaking of sound effects to bring in our yes our sound guy come on over I'm gonna actually help out here all right but if you don't have anyone if anyone had but if anyone has any questions about the photography for this entire production please start dropping them in and once we get to the question and answer part of this at the end we will bring James back you'll be very happy to answer all of them so Miriam yesterday it was happening so I've got pretty standard thing after-effects where I have duplicates of the main video layers but one of them has this great mask on it which I turn it on you can no longer see the first lady in the eye and Caroline Adler because we've mashed out a video of just the background and all of us for the 10 minute long of the video but then behind that I have their video with the appropriate cuts and so we've found a way to hide those cuts within that tiny sphere but we don't have to worry about hiding all the cuts because when you cut everything around you it's a very disorienting yeah especially me because I'm jumping but like this was a way for us to draw your attention away from the center of the screen where we could cut that and then the next stage for that so figuring out okay how do we cut without wiping to a full graphic because if we wipe to a full graphic the entire time it would get impossible to watch so the idea was how do we keep you in this room but do that and our first thought was oh well we'll just blur out the background and make the graphics feel like they're a little bit closer actually before we get into this let's actually introduce Andrew has been sitting your quiet generative sound designer destroyed air and sound recordist recorded yes you'll see them in the video so Andrew we have your attention tell us a little bit about the design well the motivation was the animations obviously you kind of get the sort of feel of work what do you want to sound like by the kind of feel of the animation so there's like it's it's like a little cartoony but not overly so you know where it's not silly I didn't want to make it silly and also this is like Russia reality so it's like sci-fi kind of don't wanted to get a lot of sciency noises in there yeah yeah I think no is it true there's a rumor going around that you recorded some live sounds yeah I shouldn't even use them throughout the piece yeah there's a few live sounds we I couldn't I compiled a bunch of library sounds that we already had but stuff that I couldn't find online or in our sound library I had to replicate one of them being the tire in the video when it goes all around a head I we were looking for our tire in the office and there was like a hand truck we had to use but yeah we also have Mariam there's a little like Easter Egg Mariam that makes a little sound effect noise like that so you can hear it around there it's in the beginning there's one beginning yeah it's an especially we had the chance to view this in the vibe headset yeah a lot and it was a great it was a great experience when you put a head and have those sound effects it's really fully immersive and it really makes it come together really recommend it's a plea from yeah cool okay so Miren let's go sorry let's get back to this yeah so yeah so let's let's talk about so this so we've basically taken this vector rectangular version we have removed them and now we have graphics coming up taking over but we'll we rack where we kind of figured out is if you put a solid color up in 360 you're just looking at blankness like there's no there's no sense of space there's no sense of like depth that you get when you have the footage of the room so a lot of the things we were playing with was gradients and putting stuff over top of that but obviously if you put a gradient over top of that you're not doing yourself a favor with having a cut so how did we do that then well I mean for a lot of ways we kind of blurred them out behind the graphics but there's a nice mathematical theory out there called the hairball theory that if you blur out the background the way you blur is by grabbing pixels from around it and overlaying them with a slight shifting effect and so what that does is where the scene comes together where the 360 video is nice and stitched up it screws with that so suddenly you have a weird line in the background so you can't Fleur the whole image so essentially what happens is when you're blurring you have the edges all the edges of the frame blur the pixels but there's nothing to blur past the frame so it ends up blurring blackness which means you get lines off we get two points on the top yeah you get two points atop and it like extreme cases you can get a line down the whole backwards right footage pins together yeah and so we solved that by only simply blurring out a mask of the front of it so there you can you can kind of see through the blur the cuts but it gets to kind of accept that it's happening but if you turn around when the graphics are blur you'll see Craig from donut just completely in film gets just watching us logo down well because everyone else was blurred out and the cut happened but there's the great thing about VR is our VR and 360 captures is it's actually really high really easy to hide things because you can direct people's attention other way so when these cuts happened one of the sort of ideas with the graphics was that will take you away from that we're gonna take you over here to watch a video or and take you beyond where this cut is happening or beyond where something's not going quite right with the stitch like you'll know if you look really hard I'm like disappearing in places but that and like it's really easy to hide those things because you have a full way of creating a language that pushes you so like one one thing about the motion graphics that we worked for was a sense of flow a sense of movement so we have these lines that push in one way we have these sort of swig Allah that push in different directions and that helps draw your attention to things helps draw your attention from her to these things and keep you in that way while we just cut right there and you never you have to cancel see ya so that's hope and like and and that's the big thing I want to say to everyone is that this stuff is actually really easy it's it's very much just like creating video in Premiere or anything like that in fact how we exported and how we did a lot of what we did for this piece was all in Premiere and we didn't need After Effects seduce you could definitely make 360 video in Africa or in Premiere or any final cut any editing software so you can start doing some of these things with 2d graphics in Premiere and even even without a software like metal which i think is about 100 and $200 yeah but these are this is math this if you look hard enough you can know exactly where to place it and move it it just makes it a lot easier and saves a lot of time I think we should open it up to some questions questions I know I saw one question about what camera we used to shoot on we shot always so we shot we shot with two cameras but our primary camera was John Villar camera courtesy of John Villar and ya work with producer Lucas Wilson from supers video productions and if you chance to look at the John camera it looks like what you think a 360 camera like it looks like a Death Star that was the running joke during production miniature Death Star yeah it's really it's pretty intimidating honestly there's nothing some extraterrestrial life-forms that are about to shoot out of that thing yeah we use primary cameras at John VI camera and our backup camera was courtesy of pitocin latrice you can see throughout the video it's cold but it's actually for a 7ss yeah it's really enough so is that one we used the beginning yeah that's the opening shot of the photo shoot is based off total cinemas prototype and also the credits the end credits the shot of us gapping around the show a strong telex in of us yeah what other questions we have to the question um I think yeah I think access is a big thing I think I think we're all unconvinced that watching it on a desktop is the best experience I think I think the adoption of headsets more and more adoption of headsets will make it a much more viable thing yeah because yeah in the future and get cool cardboard it's very cheap and very easy to do also mixing in a headset like going back and looking at it would help would help them so much yes direct you know the sound effects brand and that's that's something that you ran into the sound is that right now other than some proprietary players you can't juice or a 3d audio where essentially if you you can map audio so you can hear and get the sense that it's here get the sense that's over here but in both YouTube and any other player that's kind of for the masses right now you can't turn your head and have that turned with you so it's off-putting but like that's the future right you want to be able to look and see that this little effect up here is making a noise and you can follow that effect around right yeah I didn't want to make things too stereo so when you went 180 it was still on you you know this sound effect was still on your left side when you're facing the opposite way then we'll just kind of put you out of it so I kind of wanted to make it so it pans towards the direction that's going the animation but once you turn your head I pan it back to center so it kind of feels like it's tracking your head but it's you know it's just kind of we just have to you just have to but I mean so the other thing beyond just being able to see it that I think pitfalls for 360 video is it's very much different medium than just video and you have to kind of think about it like that yeah because the future the future for this isn't the same as film because you can't get close right we talk like we did that for this video because we have the ability to kind of add in graphics like that right but if you want to tell a story about someone you know you're never actually gonna get very close you have the great ability of putting people in their shoes like I got to see at one point someone did a short film of kind of putting you in the view and I don't know anyone who do this and it might be half lies but let's say hypothetically someone made a video where it actually puts you into the viewpoint of a doctor first and you went through this checking a patient out and then the next next time they cut you're almost on the patient and getting checked out by a doctor who thought you were just unconscious but you could see and move around and look and feel like you were not being noticed and that's something that I think speaks to the power of 360 video it's giving you those kinds of experiences but not necessarily it's not gonna give you that same kind of closeness that video does so we don't get that close up it just reminded me of film actually they've been powerful in in 360 or a VR rather as a diamond Bella butterfly film and in the film you he puts on a VR headset in like while you're in VR I think that's a crazy so another great question actually in just reading right now how much been teaching the viewer how to interact with the experience um it was it was a big deal in concept like specifically the vine Q&A section of the video so there's section of the video where we're showing off Michelle Obama's bind Q&A that she did so she would put out questions to the world and kids adults would ask her things and she'd respond and like the argue was a great chance to make you watch one of those and then shift your focus with this ball that we kind of have and big shout out to Luna North which was the production team that we can't came in to help us design this work and it turned out on credit animated yeah this it's an absolute absolutely incredible execution of what we were thinking of and I couldn't be more proud of them what is the use of shapes right skrelp of the piece you need a lot of uses circles and godly staff yeah these dotted lines as well and then squares are the containers and the ideas use those those circles as you know these guides writings markers suit because sort of bringing through the space and direct your attention with specific points within the space right and then you also use the dotted line to accent where you're actually you should be turning right so you see a lot of that a lot of play with basic shapes drop throughout the piece yeah and a lot of like the transitions of wipe across the whole screen end up on whoever's talking next right which is really nicely directional you follow the movement right actually I have a question for for James Mirim photographer oh sure so James going going back to the lead image yeah how how did you manage to get those those phones so close to Michelle's face I mean well I feel I'm gonna pop the bowl just we had this pic photographing Wow yeah there's a camera you know following Secret Service was away from we have 20 minutes with us so the first shot this was always going to be a comp what we did is we actually did a test shoot remember stairs we're trying to figure it out everybody held out and then when we came back from the shoot obviously we had the Pitts lady we had a background we brought the background with us and then we went down to the studio and using a stand with a big blue balloon on it we got everybody to stand in groups and hold their phones the important thing here is if I may stare was to get the death around because obviously this is 360 this isn't 360 but we wanted the peace in both terms of the design and also these pictures to have that sense so we just worked our way through building up there are groups of people here we've got individuals and then just spend a lot of time comping it all together row to make it look as real as possible and I think to just really convey that this is the first lady who's completely in touch with everybody on the same devices that they're in touch with her that's crazy but know is even the granular details of the shadows exactly right so what we had to do in the flares yeah they're striking across the screens what's really crazy about this is when you put it together there's obviously this huge desire to make it real but the funny thing is sometimes you've actually got to make it not too real for it to look real so we have the hand on the left there's a little too straight on so we have to twist it a little bit of put some skewing on it to give it a sense of depth and then the idea with the flare is to look like lights and bouncing off the screens people are casting shadows obviously we have a lot of real shadows that we could we can use as references but it's it's it's I think there was something like two or three hundred layers from this by the time we finished it was a hard time tracking down which screen was on which phone which we have another question coming in that the question was 60 frames per second was a choice question mark which I don't know there was some shade thrown at 60 FPS absolutely deservedly so a little too crispy for me Melissa crispy rather shoot 24 misses oh no 16 that is actually a major choice we made because in headsets especially the experience goes way up because let's say you're able to actually feel like you're moving around more naturally than you would see stuttering if you're turning quickly so we wanted to kind of bake this as forward as possible so this is something that can live in the next you know a couple months as headsets start to become more available to the public and you know into the future where there are years where hopefully everyone's and headsets I don't know I'm really into VR I'd be happy we're all in pets it's like again yeah it's so yeah it was definitely a choice it was definitely a choice mostly for future but right now YouTube plays it Facebook is locked at 30 frames per second so if we can get there well we'll be at that probably any other questions what did Michelle think about being filmed in 360 I know James what are you there I think she loved it and I you know I photographed a lot of people I think we were all blown away how this is we did in the Secret Service with even with the White House we're dealing with an incredibly short timeline and they were just so helpful and she was just so into it I mean she loved it a team love that you know it's it's a challenge because 360 shows everything and everybody's on camera for the entire duration so it's it's a lot of moving fast to think about and I was locked outside I didn't get to see everybody else we show people that's something that we realize is like so many people we're in this very like sphere important fun like people who understood are up on oculus and like understand the are thing that's coming out but the vast majority of the world out there have never done to see this it's never going to experience that which is really telling which was really tough to the gauge if people liked it or if it's just like their first experience in the office but I'll take it and you lose that sense of right and getting somebody to sit down with our headset on what to view it on a phone and see their reactions for the first time was like wow this is actually something be incredible right we just got to keep keep track of that so going back to your lead image you come over this idea of paparazzi yes cameras and then I noticed at if you scroll to the bottom of the post is another photograph that's right yeah right there you see the reverse right this is yes this is the selfie mode yes and I think this was like a counteract to that opening that leave each other we also didn't want to crop everything so it's an orange background we went we took this roll of paper to the White House the White House puts the pulling down of the carpet and just wanted to get the shot with her team this is her real team and they did this picture you can see it in the lead picture the lead VR and the crazy thing about this shot is this is one front so this one deliberately no hands have been handed moved or changed this is just a simple bit of cleanup first maybe you're standing on some tape at the bottom which are just edited that out but really that's the only bit of retouching on that as everything else as a single shot and I think it was kind of nice to see the lights to see the stands to get the hint of that incredible portrait of Lincoln on the left and brother stupidly I managed to it's such a sort of juxtaposition to the strong backgrounds throughout piece and obviously that opening image so it's nice to have both you don't have that balance you know I mean it's doing a furnish it's like doing the the flow is going to be on the page they were very well fantastic I think the try wrap up yeah yeah yeah so yeah unless anyone has any questions for our team we're gonna ask why don't we just ah the next one guys that was like one of the first comments I can I would like to sleep yeah I will see this is definitely like and I wouldn't make it clear like it was a good learning experience for us and I feel way more confident going into any of your production now absolutely yeah I think yeah I think that's like something you're definitely gonna see from the future class wants do you do you know what I want to see you know what's gonna be the next step is when you can move that camera oh you can just wait hey shoutouts to total cinema 360 Craig Gilbert Lucas Wilson of sphere productions and John VI camera for lending your services and your technology none of this yeah definitely come out of income yeah no this would have happened if we didn't have you guys as our production partners so big thank you and until the next one yes x-brawn Johnson thank you