It’s easy to skate around campus with a 360 camera and get good shots, but it isn’t easy to edit the footage afterwards. To get the footage to look like this I had to convert this double fish-eyed lens into something that covers the whole screen, an equirectangular image by “stitching” them together. The camera that I used, the Samsung gear 360, does not give you an equirectangular image. You can easily transform your images and video to an equirectangular if you are a samsung gear 360 owner with the original codes that the hardware comes with by using the CyberLink ActionDirector, but I lost that.
To Stitch in After Effects you can follow this tutorial. After you have an equirectangular image, you can upload this footage to youtube as a 360 video if you update it’s metadata with a python script or with a 360 video metadata app, or you can make the video wrap around into a sphere and make tiny planets like the picture of me on my skateboard. You can achieve this by doing a “tiny planet” effect, I followed this tutorial from Wren from Corridor Digital. 360 is a medium for storytelling that directly engages the viewer to look around, this makes it hard to tell a linear story and forces you to think about every scene more spatially. I’m curious to see what stories can come out of 360 video as a medium, but for now I just plan on making tiny planets.
