GoPro Awards: Adventure in Les 3 Valles

in the wild

Nov 17, 2018

Let's just preface this by saying Claudiu Voicu and Susie Oosting are creative geniuses (and damn good snowboarders). We've seen a fair share of mind-blowing 360 content since launching our spherical camera, Fusion, in 2017, especially since OverCapture brught professional-grade stitching and spherical-footage-editing power to any smartphone or tablet running the GoPro app. But nobody pushes the boundaries more than our creative community, so today we tip our hats (or helmets, rather) to the mind-bending editing expertise of this dynamic duo that came to us by way of GoPro Awards.

We can officially say we're frothing to use Fusion in fresh pow after watching this behind-the-scenes edit. But instead of just frothing, we're going to let Claudiu explain what it took to capture one of the trippiest OverCapture edits.

Cladiu Voicu: After making A GoPro Adventure in Tignes & Real Life Mirror's Edge, I really wanted to try something a more difficult, while also making use of the flexibility of the Fusion's OverCapture feature and high-resolution stitched videos.

Although I usually shoot with high-end cinema cameras, creatively you're far less limited when using a GoPro, as you can put it in tighter spaces, throw it around, run with it in your mouth and do all sorts of stunts without worrying about the camera breaking or weighing you down. It opens up loads of opportunities in terms of content capture and creation, which you'd otherwise have no chance in doing without a massive camera rig and an even bigger budget. I try and shoot a personal project like this once every 1 to 2 years, and so far my most fun and creative ones have been filmed on a GoPro.

There was a lot of prep work and testing for this project, but on the software side of things, I've done a lot of VR work, so I knew what could be achieved in terms of manipulating the projection of the 2:1 rendered footage for non-VR output.

The Fusion in this case was extremely helpful as the workflow was much less intensive than using other 360 cameras. For example, the stabilization was a simple toggle, and it worked amazingly well without any further post work at all.

Understanding how the software and hardware worked- and the features of both- were two really important aspects of planning this film. It wasn't so much about the editing, although that was a big factor, but more about knowing how the cameras and software would play together. For example, I'd know how much I could zoom into footage without sacrificing quality and how to shoot scenes so I'd be able to 3D track them as well.

Planning every single scene was probably the most important aspect, though. Susie and I wrote a very basic shot/scene list which we estimated would run around 3 minutes, and then using the experience I had from making the past two GoPro-only transition films, I planned out the camera movements to include the height, rotation, speed and duration of any movements leading into or out of any transition points.

Things like the weather, shadow direction and length were also important factors to consider. The fact that Susie and I both have the same snowboards made any transitions involving them a bit easier, too!

Even though the Fusion made things a lot easier as it recorded every angle, and despite all of the planning, some transitions didn't come together as anticipated, and a lot of them did take several days to get right. This is where 2-months' worth of the editing came in! Quite a few transitions have in-between frames essentially made from scratch to smoothen things out, too.

Ultimately making this film was a combination of a lot of planning and knowing how to make use of the features of Fusion and OverCapture and a ton editing work. It was all worth it in the end, and we're already planning the next one!

LINK:	https://gopro.com/news/gopro-awards-adventure-in-les-3-valles...
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