When I was a kid, our neighbor worked at General Mills, downtown, near the Buffalo River, where giant structures stood in their own city. He’d sometimes bring home of goodies for us, dented boxes of Lucky Charms, Captain Crunch, all in a giant brown bag. Someday I wanted to go see what was in those grain elevators so I went for a drive and took my 360° camera along. This video was a proof of concept for a 360 ° video story.
You can see this video in 360 degrees. You can drag the video around the screen using your moiuse. Or if you’re on your mobile phone, as you move around 360 degrees, the image will move around, just like you’re there.
I helped start the Emerging Tech Lab at the Newmark Graduate School of journalism with Matt MacVey (now at the Missouri School of Journalism). We focused on helping journalists and storytellers use new visual technologies like augmented and virtual reality in their work, exploring their future audiences and business models. The lab also aimed to ensure that journalists from all kinds of news organizations, including smaller ones, had access to learn about and use these emerging tools. At the start, the Emerging Tech Lab focused on tools like 360°-video and VR/AR headsets.
When I was a professor at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism @CUNY in NYC, we leaned hard into 360° video to tell journalism stories. There were a few reasons: it was new, the equipment was affordable and simple to operate plus the experience was amazing…ok, it was a little lo-fi at the start but still presented the world in a way you normally wouldn’t see. The NYTimes Daily 360: was publishing a short 360° video story every day..
What made it interesting for me, (and sometimes hard for the viewer) was that you could look where you’d like in a video. In the world where we frame a shot and present it to the viewer, the challenge was directing a viewers gaze where the action was happening. To me it felt “democratic”, but to many viewers, it often felt like too much work.
These are some of the pages from the Intro to Shooting in 360 degree guide that Matt MacVey and I wrote to guide small news organizations though the process of capturing and publhing 360 degrre video stories
You can download the Intro to Shooting in 360 guide here> bit.ly/intro360newsrooms