VIRTUALLY THERE: THE TIMES SQUARE EXPERIENCE - A VR/360 FILM

Brightly adorned with billboards and advertisements, Times Square is referred to as "The Crossroads of the World", drawing 50 million visitors annually. Through this 4K VR/360 film, visit the center of Times Square and experience its vibrancy as it transitions from day to night right before your eyes in a dreamlike flash!

 INSPIRATION

My inspiration for this project was to provide viewers an enchanting experience steeped in reality but delightfully full of unreality.

My goal was to live-action shoot a 360/VR film in such a way that the viewer can get immersed and really feel that they are truly standing in the center of Times Square, but twist a spin on that reality - give them a feeling they could never have in real life when it feels so real! Bend time such that everything is warping by, afternoon is turning to night within a moment, but they still experience their own movement at their usual human speed when looking around.

 THE PROCESS

After some brainstorming, I decided the best way to achieve this idea was to essentially take individual 360-degree images after a set interval of time to create a time-lapse of the world wizzing by.

I knew I wanted the experience to last at least 30 seconds, and at 24 frames per second, that meant I needed at minimum 720 360-degree shots. For it to fee like a transition from daylight to night, I built a shot list spanning 4 hours from late afternoon into evening, which meant I needed to schedule a shot every 20 seconds.

There were two major challenges that separated this from a typical time-lapse shooting though:

1) 360-degree cameras drain battery quickly and overheat fast necessitating shutdown. I could not simply set a schedule and let it run, I needed to be able to turn cameras off and replace them when needed.

2) As recording is in 360-degrees, I needed to be able to hide in plain sight while still being close enough to swap out cameras and have them ready to go within 20 seconds. I also needed to be close to hover around the equipment to ensure it wouldn’t be nudged (being in the center of packed Times Square after all!) as that would change the viewer’s vantage point and immediately lose immersion.

I decided on a specific location within Times Square to tackle these challenges (and after viewing a photo of me in the About tab, see if you can Where’s-Waldo-spot me in the film!).

Views of stitched-together equirectangular shots:

I then got in my editing zone and took all the puzzle pieces including live-action recorded audio in Times Square and turned my concept into an artifact.

After completing all the creative and post-production elements of the film, I continued on to the essential step of injecting the necessary metadata that would translate this film from a 2D video to a fully-viewable, spherical 360-degree world — essentially turning a flat map into a globe:

First-person views: