There were a lot of day and night juxtaposition shots in the example which highlighted the day/night differences in the area of interest.
However, I didn’t want to simply shoot a building during the day and then overlap it with how it looks at night. Instead I wanted to do a 360 shot and the idea seemed fun to do at the beginning. Unfortunately, the result isn’t quite what I had imagined.
There were some issues that surfaced when I did this. One being finding a good spot to shoot a 360 shot that can really show how the city lights up at night. Another spot I could think of is the pedestrian bridge over South Yarra river but that one has high pedestrian traffic. Imagine me, sitting on the middle of the bridge. That’s narrow. I’d just be a nuisance. Most people are really polite. When I was on my shooting rounds, many would stop in their tracks to avoid crossing in front of my camera’s gaze on the sidewalk. And besides, even if I did shoot on the bridge, people who do cross would just obstruct the view.
Anyway, this sketch was not easy. What I had imagined was a 360 day shot that would seamlessly transition to a 360 night shot. What do I mean by seamlessly? I would include an object that obstructed the view, say, a pole. Then with my wizardly awesome editing skills (*cough* that was sarcasm if you didn’t catch on *cough*), when the pole comes into the frame, I would overlap the other side of it which on this video would be the left, with the night shot. However such a feat was not possible because I didn’t shoot the 360 night shot at the EXACT same spot and angle. I wasn’t going to sit there for the next 2 hours staring off into the distance doing nothing. I didn’t even bring a book to read with me. So again, lack of preparation was a problem.
I couldn’t even fix it by overlapping the frame with the F sign in it during post-production because the difference between the day/night pole’s appearance was so glaringly obvious.
Another problem was the lack of smoothness over the camera’s rotation. The video in the end seemed a bit choppy and at some point it looks like it was rotating a bit too fast for the human eye. This is largely due to my tripod’s inability to rotate smoothly. I got it for cheap though so I guess that’s fair. Thinking back on it now, if I shot this in 60FPS instead of 25FPS like I did here and slowed it down, or used a warp stabiliser in post-production, it may have looked better.
In summary, 360 shot needs a wide area to work with. Lack of preparation was an issue. Pole botched editing solution. Camera rotated too fast and choppy, I blame my tripod. Need high quality gear.