Steam Bus VR | SkyBox Studio

The Steam Bus is an amazing initiative by the Columbia Public School District. It’s a traveling VR bus for kids that delivers access to technology that may not be available in a child’s own school. StoryUp VR produced a 360 video that showcases the Steam Bus in a fun and accessible way. The 360 post-production used a combination of Adobe PhotoShop, Adobe After Effects and SkyBox Studio 360/VR plugin. All the text, graphics, 2D images and GIF were easily composited with 360 footage. You can download a free demo of SkyBox Studio and try it out.

Art Director Quanah Leija-Elias (StoryUP) explains how he made the headset animation.

The headset animation was created using stop motion with a 4K photography camera, adobe Photoshop and some good old-fashioned repetition. The headset was placed on a white table with a white backdrop (whiteboard). We played with the f-stop on our camera to blend the table and backdrop into a similar white, while still keeping as much detail of the headset as possible.

At this point a turntable would have been perfect, but we just eyeballed each photo as we rotated, with our hands, a center point around the middle of the table.

Next came the lasso and magic wand tool in Adobe Photoshop…and a lot of it! I hunkered down and cut out each angle of the headset that had been photographed. This was a total of eight photos looped to repeat seamlessly.

Placing them in sequential order on the Photoshop timeline, I exported a .mov file. This animation can now be added into Adobe After Effects to apply it to 360 stitched video. You input your 2-Dimensional animation over the stitched 360 footage, then, after applying Mettle’s Skybox Converter to the animation, it outputs an equirectangular version of your animation.

And Viola! Animation within the sphere…well, just about.