ASSIGNMENT #4 – 360 FILMMAKING TIPS
7 Tips for 360 Filmmaking
- If you can see the camera, the camera can see you. Even though you may think something is hidden, make sure you double check the footage on your phone to make sure there is nothing visible that shouldn’t be.
- Heavily consider your audio! You can’t have wires hanging around everywhere, or a boom mic just out of the camera’s view like you can with conventional film-making. You have to really think about tricks to hiding the wires required to get good quality audio.
- Think of it less like a film, and more like a play. Just like a live play in a theatre, every character on stage who’s on screen / on stage, even though they may not be the focal point of the scene, can be seen. So make sure your actors are completely in character at all times, and are aware of this. Sometimes with the action taking place on one side of the room, the actors can relax but they should be paying as much attention as if they were speaking lines.
- The less cuts, the better. Immersion is key to a quality 360-video experience, and when the screen cuts to black and resets, it is lost slightly. Consider having long takes without cutting, as it really gets the viewer lost in what’s happening in the scene, as they can forget for a moment they’re watching a film at all.
- Always watch the scene as you’re filming. With the Samsung Gear 360, you can watch the footage you’re capturing live on your connected device. This is a great way to concentrate on certain aspects of your shot, as you can inspect every last inch of the captured area. As you must be out of the camera’s sight-line during filming, you should always be watching on your device
- Adjust lighting & ND filters on the Gear 360 App. There are several options to warm or cool the lighting you’ve got out of your 360 camera. This is easy to miss but is especially handy considering how difficult it is to use additional lighting in 360 filmmaking.
- Be careful with placing things in the stitch line. By the ‘stitch line’, I mean the line in your shot where the 2 180 videos will be stitched together. Sometimes things can be altered or stretched slightly and it’s safe to try and keep objects or people out of this space. You can check this on the App while you are shooting.
Apologies but I couldn’t come up with 10 so I stuck to 7 quality ones. Hope this is OK as you didn’t explicitly say it needed to be 10.