About the 360º film

Idea & Motivation

All Artists did great pieces for the show which were destroyed the next day after the event. I wanted to document the process of building. So I developed the idea of a panoramic time lapse film. Interactive panorama images (qtvr, java-applet ...) are common, however, I haven´t seen any interactive panorama with moving pictures before.

Setup

A digital SLR camera (Canon EOS 350D, 8mp) on a tripod with attached special 360 degrees lens is connected via USB to a laptop (Macbook). To make it a bit more comfortable I also used an external harddisk, a table and a chair.

Shooting

The camera was shooting in the special 360 degrees lens (PanoMAXX-Panorama-Optik), which looks like half a christmas tree ball. The camera software on the laptop was taking pictures every 20sec, about 10 hours a day, 4 days. Every day about 1000 photos were shot and downloaded directly to the laptop (external harddisk).

Post Producing

The raw photos looked like a birds eye view. To convert them into a wide screen panorama they had to be unwrapped. Instead of using the enclosed software of the lens I preferred a Photoshop action to do the batch processing. Basicly the good old polar coordinates filter did the unwrapping. I also used some additional stretching, sharpening and color correction for a final result: panorama photos with an aspect ratio of 4:1. The compositing software (After Effects) combined all of the 4000 photos to a film. Unfortunately, the 4 minutes original time lapse film was too fast to record the exciting moments (e.g. Boris Hoppek's spider), whereas boring moments were too long. Therefore I used a timewrap filter to speed some scenes up and slow others down. The final master is a quicktime movie: 2154×512pixel, 2:27min long, lossless animation codec and 12gb large. For the soundtrack I used some orginal audio footage mixed with a bunch of sound effects which were speeded up to match the film speed.

Compressing & Web Optimizing

The ultimate solution to display the interactive version of this panorama film is Adobe´s Flash Technology. The plugin, which is installed in most browsers, can play video files and can also display interactive elements. My flash programmer, Murmel, wrote some lines of actionscript to build the custom videoplayer. Regrettably, this interactive version needs a lot of bandwith to stream a big video file and a lot CPU to move around the big video file while it is streaming. Due to this I did a smaller autopilot lotech version with no interactivity at all.

Thanks

Daniel (Murmel) Schillat, UK, Malum, Mike, Claus Schröder, Peter Lorenz, Steve Stoeber, Remy, Tess, Mo, Jessica, Kim, DJ Cool aka All City Pimp ...

esher - schmuddelrot