COP - Creative Responses

I decided to do 2 different types of practicals. The first was to edit out transitions of existing VR films and replacing them with straight cuts to see how jarring they are. This was quite fun as it was good to experiment with professionally created VR footage and see their decision making behind some shots. Once I found out that editing it was just like editing normal footage, it was actually quite simple. However, I had a little bit of trouble in 2 areas:

• The films I chose all had background sound/music, and therefore cutting would also cut the sound and make it sound jarring, which would detract from the visuals. I had to try and workaround this which made it a bit more complicated, and overall they came out more rough than I would have liked
• Exporting the equirectangular video as a normal .mp4 and then uploading it to youtube wouldn't result in a VR video, but I managed to fix this by ticking an option in Premiere, "Video is VR", and that would insert the metadata for me.

I think this practical turned out really well and was a great demonstration for cuts being jarring - especially when watching them through a HMD.

The second practical was to animate a camera pan versus a cut, and this was more fun but also a lot more challenging. The warping of VR made drawing and animating the rotation a lot harder, and I had to compromise the design a lot, such as making the background just black, and pushing the animation back in virtual space to reduce the warping. I was very happy with the results though, and they again demonstrated the benefit of different transitions to cuts.

Although I was happy with the result, I still feel that this last transition didn't achieve the camera pan effect, instead looking like the balloon rotated instead. I think to fix this I would need another reference point in the background in addition to the spotlight rotating. Maybe a door or something simple.