ENVY Advertising Puts On a Show for Ground-breaking VR 360° Circus
ENVY Advertising has teamed up with Surround Vision Director, Richard Nockles, to create Circus, a ground-breaking 360° interactive film being featured as part of Power to the Pixel ‘Virtual Stories’ at the 59th BFI London Film Festival.
Commissioned by The Roundhouse, the film promotes next year’s coverage of Circus performances and has been shot in the iconic venue. Nockles captures four sets of circus performers – including aerialist, cloud swing, hand-to-hand and Cyr wheel acrobats – as part of the extravagant film.
For the company’s first ever 360° VR project, ENVY drew on its talented team to provide the VR camera stitching, offline storytelling, grade, online, sound design and titling.
Creating a truly immersive 360° montage, the film was shot using a 360Hero rig and seven separate GoPro Hero 4 cameras. With each performance filmed separately, ENVY were tasked with stitching together 28 different streams of footage to create a seamless environment.
Caspian Graca Da Silva, VFX Artist at ENVY, comments: “Circus was both a technical and creative challenge as we had to merge the seven different layers of video blending and masking action from one zone to the other as needed. Working in a spherical environment we had to make it possible to create new graphics that could be both rendered to an equirectangular space and integrated with the footage.”
Richard Nockles adds: “It was tricky to shoot as the safety of the circus performers meant the camera had to be suspended way above the rigging, so the performers had to stick to specific zones to allow ENVY Advertising to stitch their individual performances together as one. We wanted the whole video to feel natural and we’re really happy with the result. The camera sees in all directions so we couldn’t let any of their moves slip up for a second!”
The resulting experience puts the viewer at the heart of The Roundhouse, watching the performances seamlessly in the ultimate ringside experience.
