I love storytelling and the processes and challenges that go with it. With film, games and more recently mixed, augmented and virtual realities, we’re able to experience narratives in more immersive ways. From traditional linear videos for 2D screens to fully transportive living panoramas in HoloLens, I’ve been fortunate to explore fillmmaking and storytelling in both proven and innovative ways.

VIDEOS TO INSPIRE

During my 9 plus years at Microsoft, I had the opportunity to create and work on dozens of internal marketing and vision videos for Kinect, HoloLens and the Microsoft Photos app. These videos were used for cross team communication, development updates and product planning.

As a filmmaker, I wore many hats during the creation of these videos. Most notably I was the Visual FX Supervisor and acted as Editor on numerous videos. I also lent my hand at conceptualizing, writing, directing and acting when necessary.

BUILDING A CAMERA

New ways of telling stories sometimes require new techniques and technologies. During the development of Holotour, a mixed reality travel and educational experience for Microsoft’s HoloLens, I was challenged with creating a camera rig that could capture 360 spherical videos. At the time, there weren’t any suitable off the shelf solutions that provided the quality and fidelity that was required. Always up for a challenge, I designed and built a prototype rig out of foam core, Velcro and wood.

The prototype 360/180 video panoramic camera rig on location in San Francisco.

A small group was sent to San Francisco to test the rig and capture footage and audio for a proof of concept prototype The footage was combined with 3D elements and visual effects to create “living” panoramas. These were meant to capture the sights, sounds and essence of a location in order to immerse the viewer in the location.

Creating these living panoramas required new pipelines, workflows and tools to accomplish. I worked with a handful of 3D artists, audio engineers and developers to streamline the processing of the captured content. This included stitching the video imagery, color processing, compositing and fine tuning. Overtime, I helped upgrade the rig and refined the workflow for production on HoloTour’s premier locations, Italy and Peru.

HoloTour - Living Panorama processing - part 1 of 2

This is a glimpse at the workflow I developed to capture and process full 360 spherical video for the Holotour experience for Microsoft's HoloLens.

The final 8K x 4K equirectangular video vingettes were captured from a custom designed camera rig I built using 14 GoPro cameras.

HoloTour - Living Panorama processing - part 2 of 2

To complete the illusion of immersion for HoloTour's living panoramas a more traditional visual effects pipeline was used. This included painting out foreground elements and compositing in fake tourists filmed in a make shift green screen stage in my office.

HoloTour - Living Panoramas color processing

Making the 360 spherical video portion of HoloTour's living panoramas really pop was achieved with custom real-time color processing and evaluation tools. This allowed artists to fine tune actual perceived color values in the HoloLens to create vivid and immersive vignettes.

HoloTour - Living Panorama examples

Living panoramas were immersive holographic vingettes meant to transport a viewer around the globe and back in time. They were created with a mix of real world 360 video capture, 3D space reconstruction and objects, compositing and audio wizardry.

These are some examples of actual captures featuring locations in Rome, Italy.

HoloTour - Living Panorama processing - part 1 of 2

HoloTour - Living Panorama processing - part 2 of 2

HoloTour - Living Panoramas color processing

AUTONOMOUS VIDEO BOOTH

During my last year at Microsoft, I co-created an automated end to end solution called the Autonomous Video Booth. It was an experiment to simplify the video creation process and empower anyone in Microsoft to create informational videos with ease. My fellow creators and I took the Autonomous Video Booth to Microsoft’s annual Build conference and built two of them for the One Week Hackathon. A permanent installation of the Autonomous Video Booth was setup at Microsoft’s haven of experimental learning The Garage.