IRALTA VR's New Immersive Experience: Dive into the Galapagos Islands with Mistika VR

Published On: April 16th, 2024

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[SPANISH BELOW]

Immerse yourself in the creation process of Reserva Hermandad', the VR 360 experience filmed in the magnificent Galapagos Islands in Ecuador. Created by production studio IRALTA VR, explore how the team leveraged the exceptional capabilities of Mistika VR to produce this incredible documentary.

Presented during the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai (COP28 UAE), and with the support of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the purpose of the project goes beyond highlighting environmental conservation.

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Our goal was clear: to transport the event attendees, including ministers and high-level leaders, on an underwater adventure in the Galapagos Islands. This experience effectively highlighted the importance of the debt-swap' project for conservation, to comply with climate regulations, and to protect our ecosystems, highlighted Alejandra Par s Gallego, Communication Consultant, Climate Change Division at IDB.

Surpassing Technical Challenges and Meeting Tight Deadlines The pre-production process was very challenging as filming deadlines were delayed for security reasons. Nevertheless, the delivery date remained unchanged. Additionally, due to environmental concerns of the park, the team had to go through a complex approval process to obtain filming permits.

However, optimizing the camera equipment to carry only the minimum necessary weight ensured agility when moving around the islands. Finally, several camera systems were selected by IRALTA VR for filming beyond 8K.

We choose Abbys for the underwater scenes, Meta Three to capture land footage, and our invention, Trinity, for aerial scenes. We were very lucky to have one of the most experienced DOPs in VR, Ignacio Ferrando, on the team, who is used to filming in these types of situations and environments, shared Ram n Verdugo, Director of Photography at IRALTA VR.

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According to Ignacio Ferrando, DOP and Co-Founder of baco Digital, a large part of the documentary were the underwater scenes.

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Filming with the Abbys rig is quite complex; setting it up on the boat always has its difficulties as well as the submarine takes due to the strong currents. However, despite the obstacles, collaborating with my friends from IRALTA VR in such a special place was truly enjoyable.

The Creation of Trinity To optimize the filming process across different environments and to avoid penalties for excessive transportation, the team had to split into two different units and carry a lightweight drone. This led them to invent their rig for capturing high-resolution aerial shots. Creating this rig felt like revisiting the early days of experimenting with custom set-ups of GoPro's to create 360 scenes. Throughout the creation process, we managed to work with 8 disassembled and stripped-down GoPros to lighten the setup as much as possible, explains Ram n.

This is when Trinity was born, known by friends as Trini , with the name being inspired by its distinctive feature, capable of withstanding high temperatures. One of the main advantages along with high resolutions (12-16K), is its lightweight and quick setup. We would arrive at the location, review the takeoff and trajectory points, and in a few minutes Trinity was in the air, described Ram n.

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Tackling Stabilization Challenges with Mistika VR Mistika VR played a pivotal role already during the filming phase, especially when working with dailies for review, which made the final post-production process much more efficient. Mistika VR enabled us to have all the content pre-stitched, which was then edited and distributed among several team members to fine-tune the stitching.

Additionally, Mistika VR was indispensable for stabilization. To stabilize the scenes shot with Meta Three, Abbys, and Trinity we worked with the Optical Flow feature. The workflow in Mistika is very practical: one team member worked on creating templates or presets as precise as possible for each camera, which were later applied to other scenes and simply refined the stitching as needed.

Mistika

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