Immersive 360 video tour takes you to places the public has never seen!
This 360 video tour will take you to all the best parts of the plant, try it on your 360 goggles if you have them!
When Uniper approached us to produce photography and video from the last UK coal power station’s final year before shutdown, they also asked for some internal 360 content.
Instead of just producing some simple 360 shots for web use, we decided to set ourselves a challenge and do something which had never been done before.
Capture an entire power station in a walkthrough 360 immersive video tour.
With some basic rules;
Don’t stop the action, fly up the stack and the cooling tower, motion track call outs in 360, and shoot using a global 360 drone.
How hard could all that be?
Well, it turns out, harder than we thought.
The first challenge? Design a viable route for the immersive walk through tour.
Ratcliffe on Soar power station is huge. And it’s very, very dark, and very, very dirty.
And there are lots of dark dirty stairs. And it’s noisy… and hot.. and did we say how big it is?
So you need to shoot in very low light.
You need to be very, very careful with access and safety.
And if you do it all in one go it’s gonna end up with a video runtime of a couple of hours.
The second challenge was all the technical bits.
How do you do motion track graphics in 360, when the shot is constantly moving?
What camera is mobile and light enough to allow us to constantly be moving, in a dangerous environment, and be good in low light?
Where can we get a 360 global drone video camera now that the only one was dropped by the manufacturer?
All the limitations on site combined to put real limits on video quality, and we knew we were going to have to test a lot of options for motion control, noise, audio, grading and everything in between.
So Emma spent weeks testing, trialling and practicing.
She tested different capture options and noise reduction. She trialled different workflows. And she practiced how to walk to capture the best footage!
Fortunately we had recently invested in a new super-duper edit suite which was JUST able to cope with 8k footage, multiple effects layers, motion tracking graphics, stabilisation, noise reduction, resizing, colour grading, and then rendering and resizing, without falling over and not finishing the tasks prior to dawn of the new millennium!
We split the shoot over three elements.
Foley Audio Capture; We recorded audio from the plant to enable shots in shut down areas. And still have the right noises!
Ground Footage; Shot over two visits, the first to capture everything, the second to fix issues and capture shots to help with linking the drone content.
Drone Footage; This needed the weather to be spot on, and had to work with the ground footage. So it was shot between the two ground shoots, by our associate drone pilot Luke, who also was tasked with sourcing the 360 camera drone.
Multiple edits of the 360 video tour were produced.
A “Master” full video of the entire tour for archival purposes, with minimal cuts and ramps.
A “Master” condensed version which still hit all the highlights, but used ramps and masked cuts to remove time… (That’s the version above!)
A more gentle version of the above, removing the ramps which some folks found unsettling, and replacing with cuts.
A social edit of the tour… cut down to the main bits and made A LOT shorter!
To our surprise, Uniper then created a bespoke viewing room just to watch the tour at the closing event…
So, if you have a spare 8-9 minutes free, have a watch!
We won’t ever see a facility like Ratcliffe again, it’s a part of the industrial history of the UK.
Hopefully this tour will help to preserve that.
PS; if you’re watching this on 360 goggles, then we would advise sitting down.
Check out our closing day video, which got over 3 million views in a week, and the book of photography we shot over a full year!
If your business would like to let people explore something unique in 360, Get in Touch!
PS; Readers may note, we have not told you about the gear we used! This is because we reached out for help to the manufacturer of said gear on multiple occasions. And despite the unique nature of the project, and the challenges we faced, they never replied in any way.
Which is a shame.
