Virtual Reality in the Movies: A 360 Experience | Raging Cinema

Raging Cinema (Rishi Kaneria) is a content creator and film essayist who has been staff-picked three times on Vimeo, and been blogged about by The Verge, Time, Popular Mechanics and Gizmodo. Raging Cinema’s latest video is a brief look at the movies that have portrayed VR over the years, from 1973’s World on a Wire, through TRON, Lawnmower Man, up until 2013’s The Congress.  And because the medium is the message: it is a 360 video.  Think of it as a 360 supercut. This is Rishi’s first 360 video, thanks to Mettle SkyBox Studio for Adobe After Effects and SkyBox 360/VR Tools for Premiere Pro. And one of the first in his space (video essays, supercuts, etc).

Rishi explains his 360 workflow:

1) For each film in my video essay, I cut and joined together sixteen 15 sec clips in Adobe Premiere Pro and exported each at 640×360.  Leaving me with 24 video clips that I would then use in step 2.

2) In Adobe After Effects I used each of the exports from step 1) to create a grid of videos for each film.  This is also where I animated the film grid coming in and out.  I exported all 24 of these out as their own video clips that I would then use in step 3.

3) Finally I imported these 24 animated grid clips into another After Effects project that was setup with the Mettle plugin.  I strung them together in the 3d environment putting the following effect on each clip:  “CC Environment” with “Spherical” mapping.  In essence I made each video grid a spherical environment map with a “screen” blend mode so that the master environment map of the horizon and sky would show through.  I also added text to the project and marked the text as a 3d layer and adjusted the placement of it in 3d space.

4) For the audio I exported a temp file out of After Effects and edited the audio to it in Adobe Premiere where I had more realtime feedback.  After lining the audio and music up I exported just the audio and imported that back into the main After Effects file.

5)  I used the SkyBox plugin to create the “SkyBox Master (SkyBox Output)” which I rendered out uncompressed.  I then took this uncompressed file and ran it through Adobe Media Encoder using the YouTube 4K preset but matching source and then resizing from 4096×2048 to 3840×1920 in preparation for upload to YouTube.

6) Finally I used YouTube’s “Spatial Media Metadata Injector” to mark the video as spherical and tag the video as 360.  I then uploaded that new file to YouTube where it was ready to be consumed as a 360 video.

About Raging Cinema (Rishi Kaneria)

Born and raised in London, Rishi has a degree in Physics, and through his twenties owned and ran a boutique video-focused interactive agency that was once featured on CNN.  He later joined IBM’s innovation labs, where he led the creation of an educational MMO experience that recreated the Forbidden City in China, a project that was detailed in a History Channel documentary.  He is currently a Creative Director working out of Atlanta.  He’s also a a husband and father whose passion is making short films and video essays.

Twitter: @rishikaneria

Vimeo

YouTube

He has been staff picked 3 times on Vimeo, have garnered over 4 million views across all his videos and have been blogged about by The Verge, Gizmodo, Time Magazine, Wired, Entertainment Weekly, Popular Mechanics, and more and tweeted by Edgar Wright, Lee Unkrich, Adam Savage, The Academy, British Film Institute, Tom Green, Daniel Pemberton and others.