How did Dinner Party leverage the medium of 360 video? How did you leverage 360 to create immersion?
Dinner Party leverages the medium of 360 videos to create a sense of immersion through storytelling and the brilliant use of camera movement. At first, the narration of the story makes me feel like I was one of the guests at the dinner party, listening to this inexplicable event. However, this perception slowly fades away when the videos travel back in time to the haunted memories of the couples. I had a realization that the audience was the alien that abducts them and watches over them throughout the entire video, from the beginning when we descend from the darkness to the room, to the end when the guests in the room disappeared, leaving the petrified couples by themselves.
I totally agree with Jessica Brillhart’s statement that in VR everything is a potential “frame” because it is “a relative window of experience derived from the visitor’s field of vision”. In my 360 video assignment, I transformed three of my animations made in the After Effects and the Trapcode plugin into a VR experience. I had a really hard time editing the video. In normal videos or 3D animations, everything is locked to a fixed perspective, a window of view that the artist imposes. I only need to worry about this specific viewport, and that everything inside looks nice and coherent. I am able to light a specific area without considering it to be realistic in other perspectives. However, in VR, the audience decides where they want to look at. This creates a ton of problems. Some of the models look odd, broken, or disproportionate at some angles, which I need to spend a lot of time fixing.