 Hello world! Welcome. We're in the queue from the Verge office recording live. Following up with our release of Michelle Obama 360. I'm assuming most of you guys are watching because you had a chance to watch the video. And if you haven't, then you should certainly go to youtube.com or slash the Verge and check it out because it's incredible. It's amazing. It's insane. It's pretty great. We're all very happy. Anyway, so I'm Trey Shallehore, producer for the Verge Video team. I am here with Rael Nielsen, director of Verge Video. Tom Connors, senior director, mastermind behind this project. And James Barham, art director. Also photographer who took these stunning portraits of the lovely Michelle Obama. So we're going to kind of keep this short and simple. We really want to target a lot of questions involving post-production. How did we pull this off? A lot of our colleagues have been curious about this. My friends have been texting me since the release of this, have been curious about this. And so this is an opportunity for us to sort of step behind the scenes and share with you guys what happened. So I think we should just jump into the background. How did we conceive this idea? How did we conceptualize this idea? Yeah, well, yeah, we found out we were going to do this at CES this year, which was a terrible time to find out of it. But we threw the idea out there and the White House is very receptive to the idea of us doing this in 360. So we got partnered with John and some other producers to actually make this in 360, capturing it. And then that was kind of the easy part. Shooting in 360 is not actually that difficult. You set the camera down and you turn it on and it goes. It worked. And then the post-production side of things was when we really took our time trying to craft our story and figure out all the sort of creative avenues we wanted to do, because 360 is a very new type of medium for us to live in. And using it, at least for me in the past, I've always had a lot of trouble with 360 content because it is so far away from the person. I feel like you lose the chance to actually engage. Like, I'm very close to Trey and James and Miriam right now. I can see their face and I can see their expression and I understand exactly what's going on with them. But a lot of times in 360, you're seven, six feet away from the camera and you're very, very small and you don't get that. So a big design thing that we wanted to figure out with this piece is how do we inject that into a 360 interview in a way that feels natural and seamless and doesn't take you out of it, but when it does, it is informative and growing the piece. Absolutely. And I want to also state for the record that this is The Verge and Vox Media's first 360 project. It was a really ambitious first start. It was a very ambitious launch to do 360 when we have such a high profile subject to go with, right? I believe we've been trying to do some sort of 360 content for a really long time now. And I think the first thing I said talking about it was let's not do it on anything really important so we can learn on an easy thing. And we didn't do that. They were talking to the White House and they were like, oh, let's do it in 360. I mean, the whole thing about this is like you said, you can't move the camera and it all happened so fast. And it's the White House and you've got to get that entire crew in there. And I mean, it has to be said that the White House were incredible. They were so supportive, so easy to work for. And, you know, from the photo shoot side, what we were thinking about is how, okay, it's not enough just to go and stick a 360 camera there. We've got to take pictures. There's got to be a story about it. And so I think from when we were working it out, we came up with the selfie idea. We did some tests. The White House loved it. And we went off to do it. But the thing that was so important is we had to do this for real. We had to take that orange background to the White House. We had to set it up. We had to get that real, her real team there and to sort of show the background because otherwise it would have looked like we shot it in the studio. So from a design standpoint, why the orange? It's the verge orange, right? And it's just, you know, it's a lovely color. It's warm. It's bright. It's crisp. And the other thing was, you know, this is an opportunity to photograph Michelle Obama, the first lady, in a way that's never been done before. We don't want this to look like a good housekeeping cover or something else. This had to be for us. We had to own it. And what better way to own it is to embed the color of the verge in the very pictures. They're not going to work anywhere else. That's what was so important, I think. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, you can see it makes her truly pop out, right? It's like a warm summer day. But it wasn't. It was January and it was freezing. And I, if everybody remembers, spent 50 minutes outside of the main security while I had a little bit of an instance to get into the White House. But they let me in and they were very nice. And thank you very much. It was just too charming to not let in. So, yeah. So, you know, we came up with this idea of shooting it in 360. We came up with the idea of bringing in our verge orange into the White House and kind of creating this really cool hip look, right? So take me through some of the ideas. First, I guess let's talk about video. 360 with motion graphics and animation sounds pretty crazy. I imagine that the process of how do you take the space and incorporate graphics so they're not super jarring or really wacky. How how how did you maintain this consistency and look and flow? Right. So and animation, I think the main sort of idea that I always kind of came up with and I'll throw credit where credit is due to our past alum, Phil Robibro, who made a series for us called The Big Future, where we had interviewed Bill Gates in a regular interview. And he took that interview footage mixed with a little bit of a video script and made these really beautiful motion graphics that helped take a standard interview and expand it out into this big sort of infographic explainer video on a subject with an interviewer. And it was really great. It was really inspiring to this piece, which was, OK, can we take that? Can we take that feel and incorporate that into a 360 space, taking away sort of that, oh, you're just in one room and there's only one thing to look at and you get bored after you kind of looked around for a little bit. Here we've injected things for you to look at as much as it makes sense. And actually, so talking about process for doing it, I'm going to shift over to Miriam a little bit because she was the integral in figuring out all the technical things of this. And yeah, let's bring up After Effects and just kind of look at this for a second. So to get you an idea of kind of the scale of it, our main comp has 129 layers all moving around at once. So forgive my tiny little laptop if it is creaking along trying to keep up. So what our main workhorse when we did this was this software called Metal, which allows you to take 2D animations and bring them into the 360 space. So if you look at this little phone on the side up here, if I take off the Metal programming, it turns it. It's hard to see because the screen is so small, but it turns it all flat and it will look very strange in the preview player. Is this on the right time code at all? Let's clean back up real fast here. Can you explain how the idea of what something called an echo-rectangular view is? For sure. Okay, so the easiest way to think about echo-rectangular projection is kind of like the classic world map you see where it's got like Greenland super massive in the top and kind of all the other countries kind of normal spaced along the equator. Because what it does is it takes a globe, which is a sphere, and kind of peels apart the top of the globe and makes it really wide. So if you look at this image of the room we have here, you can see the chandelier is massive and all of the production equipment on the bottom is stretched out huge. Whereas if you look at the interview, it's pretty close to being... Right. When you go in here, you can... It's so slow. If you go in here, you can look down and see that it's all right in this little clump. And this is a metal thing that's using cameras in After Effects to sort of create an approximation of how that will look once it's all stitched together. So the idea is you take that flat image and software that you uploaded to YouTube, Facebook, hopefully you can get that, send that up to them. And they will take that square and then wrap it into a circle through programming, and that's what allows you to spin around later. Yeah, and so metal kind of workhorses it and takes 2D objects that you put in that are normally in regular flat and transforms them and warps them so that they have this curve, which when you put them into 360 view... Come on, computer, you can do it. I believe in you. You can then turn around and see them. And I think that was, to me, that was a really surprising thing that it actually... I think going into this, we had anticipated, oh man, we are going to be editing in 360. This is going to be a much more complicated process. But really, it was pretty much the same as editing a 2D process. You're still editing in a rectangle. It's a 2 to 1 ratio instead of a 16, 9 that we're used to. But everything else was the same. We animate on there and metal and how you do wipes just translates to 360. So you start to sort of be able to look at that ecto rectangular stretch out thing and kind of see how it makes sense in 360, in animating in 360. So it was actually like super fun to put in all these graphics and get to see them in there and then realize that it wasn't actually that difficult to do. No, I mean, because you're basically still editing the same way. It's just you have to be a little more conscious about cuts and whatnot because this can feel super jarring. So at any point, did you need to edit with a headset? Or can you edit with a headset? Or does it all happen in 2D? The easiest way to edit is in 2D, for sure. There are a couple of plug-ins that give you headsets, but not for After Effects, right? Not that we have the runs. Yeah, right, right. So in the future, I can't wait to edit in VR. Editing in VR is going to be the best. If you give me a keyboard that I can strap to my chair and I mouse it, I can just wirelessly turn, I'll edit for days. It'll be great. The funny thing, the whole thing with this video is once you put on a headset, it completely makes sense. When we got into the VR room and put this headset on, apart from tying myself in complete knots with the cable of the headset, because it kept spinning around all the time, it was amazing. Yeah, and that's part of the design we talked about when we were coming up with the idea for these animations and what they would look like. That was something we talked about. How does the design of these push you in certain directions? Because part of 360 is you want to give people the ability to look anywhere they want and follow their interest in any way and reward them for looking at it, reward them for checking things out. Even the setup of how we set up the shot, we wanted to have cameras there to do those cutaways, but we also wanted interesting things. So if you watch the video, I want a slider bouncing back and forth the entire time. We used that shot once in the piece and I wasn't super into the shot, but it gives some action to that background. Staging that out is part of how we conceptualize this whole thing. You wanted to be able to look at, because we very easily could have taken us out of that room entirely and left you in an empty room. Actually, Miriam, do you want to explain the crazy cheat we figured out for this? Because cutting is so jarring, and obviously this interview is about 20 minutes long? It was about a 20 minute interview that we cut down to 10 minutes. There are some cuts and we've hidden them in a bunch of different ways, but the easiest way we did to hide it was we took just a straight 10 minutes of the background of all of us crew hanging out and ended up masking it out so that the background never cuts at all. We have... let's see if we can get it to show up. More sound effects, please. Load computer, you can do it. Actually, while this loads, this might be a good time, speaking of sound effects, to bring in our sound guy. Come on over. I'm going to actually hop out and let him sit here. I can come back if you want, but if you don't want to... If anyone has any questions about the photography for this entire production, please start dropping them in. And once we get to the question and answer part of this at the end, we'll bring James back. He'll be very happy to answer all of them. So Miriam, show us what's happening here. So I've got a pretty standard thing in After Effects where I have duplicates of the main video layer. But one of them has this great mask on it, which, if I turn it on, you can no longer see the First Lady and Neli and Caroline Adler because we've masked out a video of just the background of all of us for the 10-minute long of the video. But then behind that, I have their video with the appropriate cuts. And so we've found a way to hide those cuts within that tiny sphere, but we didn't have to worry about hiding all the cuts of us. Because when you cut everything around you, it becomes very disorienting. Tom jumps like 10 meters. Yeah, especially me because I'm jumping. But this was a way for us to draw your attention away from the center of the screen where we could cut that. And then the next stage for that, so figuring out, okay, how do we cut without wiping to a full graphic? Because if we wiped to a full graphic the entire time, it would get impossible to watch. So the idea was, how do we keep you in this room but do that? And our first thought was, oh, well, we'll just blur out the background and make the graphics feel like they're a little bit closer. Actually, before we get into this, let's actually introduce Andrew, who's been sitting here quietly. Andrew Marino, ladies and gentlemen, sound designer, extraordinaire. And sound recordist. And sound recordist. You'll see him in the video. He's got like a frame handle. Right side of the frame, holding the bag. Yeah. There he is. That's cute. So Andrew, we have your attention. So tell us a little bit about, you know, what was the motivation behind the sound design? Well, the motivation was the animations, obviously. You kind of get the sort of feel of what do you want the sound to sound like by the kind of feel of the animation. So there's like, it's like a little cartoony but not overly so, you know, where it's not silly. I didn't want to make it silly. I wanted to make it like virtual reality. So it's like sci-fi. I kind of wanted to get a lot of sciency noises in there. Yeah. Now, is it true, there's a rumor going around, that you recorded some live sounds? Yeah, there's a few. And used them throughout the piece? Yeah, there's a few live sounds. I couldn't, I compiled a bunch of library sounds that we already had. Stuff that I couldn't find online or in our sound library. I had to replicate one of them being the tire in the video when it goes all around your head. We were looking for a tire in the office and there was like a hand truck we had to use. But yeah, we also have Miriam, there's a little like Easter egg, Miriam makes a little sound effect noise. Yeah, like that. So if you can hear it around there, it's in the beginning, there's one in the beginning. Yeah, I think you can find it if you try to harp. Yeah, especially, we got the chance to view this in the Vive headset a lot. And it was a great experience when you put headphones on and have those sound effects, it's really fully immersive and it really makes it come together. Yeah, I really recommend listening to it on headphones. It's a plea from an audio guy. Don't watch it on mute like this. Yeah. Cool, okay, so Miriam, let's get back to this. Can I just say like I'm learning this as these people are, like I didn't know that was how you did that. Yeah. That was a really cool idea. So yeah, so let's talk about, so we've basically taken this extra rectangular version, we've removed them and now we have graphics coming up, taking over. But what we kind of figured out is if you put a solid color up in 360, you're just looking at blankness. Like there's no sense of space, there's no sense of like depth that you get when you have the footage of the room. So a lot of the things we were playing with was gradients and putting stuff over top of that. But obviously if you put a gradient over top of that, you're not doing yourself a favor with hiding a cut. So how did we do that then? Well, I mean, for a lot of ways we kind of blurred them out behind the graphics, but there's a nice mathematical theory out there called the hairball theory. That if you blur out the background, the way you blur is by grabbing pixels from around it and overlaying them with a slight shifting effect. And so what that does is where the scene comes together, where the 360 video is nice and stitched up, it screws with that. So suddenly you have a weird line in the back. So you can't blur the whole image. So essentially what happens is when you're blurring, you have the edges, all the edges of the frame blur the pixels, but there's nothing to blur past the frame. So it ends up blurring blackness, which means you get lines. Well, you get two points on the top. Yeah, you get two points on top and in extreme cases, you can get a line down the whole back where the footage pins together. And so we solved that by only simply blurring out a mask of the front of it. So there you can kind of see through the blur the cuts, but it gets to kind of accept that it's happening. But if you turn around when the graphics are blurred, you'll see Craig from Dolce & Gabbana just completely in focus, just watching us all go down while everyone else is blurred out and the cut happens. But the great thing about VR and 360 captures is it's actually really easy to hide things because you can direct people's attention other ways. So when these cuts happen, one of the sort of ideas with the graphics was that we'll take you away from that. We're going to take you over here to watch a video. We're going to take you beyond where this cut is happening or beyond where something's not going quite right with the stitch. Like, you'll know if you look really hard, I'm like disappearing in places, but that and like it's really easy to hide those things because you have a full way of creating a language that pushes you. So like one thing about the motion graphics that we worked for was a sense of flow, a sense of movement. So we have these lines that push in one way. We have these sort of swiggles that push in different directions and that helps draw your attention to things, helps draw your attention from her to these things and keep you in that way while we just cut right there and you never have a chance to see. Right. Giving away all the secrets. Yeah. So that's hope and like and that's the big thing I want to say to everyone is that this stuff is actually really easy. It's very much just like creating video in Premiere or anything like that. In fact, how we export it and how we did a lot of what we did for this piece was all in Premiere. And we didn't need After Effects to do this. You could definitely make 360 video in Premiere or any editing software. And Metal just released stuff for Premiere so you can start doing some of these things with 2D graphics in Premiere without even going to After Effects now. And even without a software like Metal, which I think is about $100, $200. Yeah, it ranges for the studio versus. Yeah, but these are this is math. If you look hard enough, you can know exactly where to place it and move it. It just makes it a lot easier and saves you a lot of time. That's true. You can definitely do it all on your own. I think we should open it up to some questions. I know I saw one question about what camera we used to shoot on. We shot with two cameras, but our primary camera was the Jon VR camera. Courtesy of Jon VR. And we worked with producer Lucas Wilson from Super Superior Productions. And if you get a chance to look at the Jon camera, it looks like what you think a 360 camera. It looks like a Death Star. It looks like a Death Star. That was the running joke during production was that we were filming with the miniature Death Star. Yeah, it's really it's pretty intimidating. There's definitely some extraterrestrial life forms that are about to shoot out of that thing. We used the primary camera as the Jon VR camera and our backup camera was courtesy of Total Cinema 360. Which you can see throughout the whole video. If the graphics will go away. Wait for that container to light. It's going to be a little bit. There it is. It's right here. This little dude. It's actually for a 7S's strap. So is that the one we used in the beginning? Yeah, so the opening shot of the photo shoot is based off of Total Cinema's prototype. And also the credits, the end credits. The shot of us gathering around Michelle to take the Jon camera. So that's the Jon photo and then this footage is from Total Cinema's prototype. Here we are, so happy. Oh, nothing. What other questions do we have? Any other questions? What did Golden Shore find in the 360 video to overcome to be sustainable? It's a good question. I think access is a big thing. I think we're all unconvinced that watching it on a desktop is the best experience. I think the adoption of headsets, more and more adoption of headsets will make it a much more viable thing. Because in the future. You can't watch it in a headset if you don't have one. It looks fantastic. Get cool cardboard. It's very cheap and very easy to do. Also mixing in a headset, going back and looking at it would help so much more. Direct sound effects. That's something you ran into with sound. Right now, other than some proprietary players, you can't do 3D audio. Essentially you can map audio so you can hear and get the sense that it's here, get the sense that it's over here. But in both YouTube and any other player that's for the masses right now, you can't turn your head and have that turn with you. It's off-putting, but that's the future. You want to be able to look and see that this little effect up here is making a noise and you can follow that effect around. I didn't want to make things too stereo. When you went 180, the sound effect was still on your left side when you're facing the opposite way. I wanted to make it so it pans towards the direction it's going, the animation. But once you turn your head, I pan it back to center so it feels like it's tracking your head. But it's just a little... You just have to move your head that way. The other thing beyond just being able to see it that I think pitfalls for 360 video is it's very much a different medium than just video. You have to think about it like that. Yeah, absolutely. Because the future for this isn't the same as film because you can't get close. We did that for this video because we have the ability to add in graphics like that. But if you want to tell a story about someone, you're never actually going to get very close. You have the great ability of putting people in their shoes. I got to see at one point someone did a short film of putting you in the view. I don't know if anyone who did this and it might be half lies. But let's say hypothetically someone made a video where it actually puts you into the viewpoint of a doctor first. And you went through this checking a patient out. And then the next time they cut, you're all of a sudden the patient and getting checked out by a doctor who thought you were just unconscious. But you could see and move around and look and feel like you were not being noticed. And that's something that I think speaks to the power of 360 video is giving you those kinds of experiences. But not necessarily…it's not going to give you that same kind of closeness that video does. We don't get that close up. It just reminded me of a film actually that would have been powerful in 360 or VR rather. It's Dive and Bell and the Butterfly. Anyone seen this film? No. Oh, guys. Oh, no. Sorry. No, it's fine. Okay, great. Thanks, guys. Film buffs here. All right. Good. There's a film up here at Sundance. Reggie Watts was in it. It's a VR film. And in the film, he puts on a VR headset while you're in VR. I think that's a crazy thing. I think that works. So another great question actually I'm reading right now. How much did teaching the viewer how to interact with the experience come into play? It was a big deal in concepting, like specifically the Vine Q&A section of the video. So there's a section of the video where we're showing off Michelle Obama's Vine Q&A that she did. So she would put out questions to the world and kids, adults would ask her things and she'd respond. And VR gives us a great chance to make you watch one of those and then shift your focus with this ball that we kind of have. And big shout out to Lunar North, which was the production team that came in to help us design this work. And it turned out incredible. And animated. And animated, yeah. It's an absolutely incredible execution of what we were thinking of and I couldn't be more proud of them. It's because of the use of shapes, right? A lot of, if you scroll through the piece, you see a lot of circles and all these dotted lines as well. And then squares and the containers. And the idea is use those circles as these guides, right? These markers to sort of bring you through the space and direct your attention to specific points within the space. And then you also use the dotted lines to accent where the direction you should be turning. So you see a lot of that, a lot of play with these sort of basic shapes throughout the piece. Yeah, and a lot of the transitions that wipe across the whole screen end up on whoever is talking next. Which is a really nice direction where you follow the movement. Right. Actually, I have a question for James Barham, photographer. Can I have a seat? Sure. Can we squeeze all of them? Yeah, squeeze all of them in here. So James, going back to the lead image, how did you manage to get those phones so close to Michelle's face? I mean, I get uncomfortable just looking at this photo and thinking, wow. There's a camera, you know, a foot away from Michelle. Well, the crazy thing about this is I remember we had the first meeting and everything was happening so fast. Got on the subway to come up to the office and drew a sketch of a load of people holding phones up to the first lady. And we got here and thought, how the hell are we going to do this? Because we had 20 minutes with her. So the first shot, this was always going to be a comp. And so what we did is we actually did a test shoot. You remember? We went downstairs. We tried to figure it out. Everybody held out their phones and we did the shot. And then when we came back from the shoot, obviously we had the pictures of the first lady. We had the background. We brought the background with us. And then we went down to the studio and using a stand with a big blue balloon on it, we got everybody to stand in groups and hold their phones up. And the important thing here is, if I may stand, was to get the depth around it because obviously this is 360. I mean, this isn't 360, but we wanted the piece in both terms of the design and also these pictures to have that sense. So we just worked our way through building up. There are groups of people here. We shot individuals and then just spent a lot of time comping it all together to make it look as real as possible. And I think to just really convey that this is the first lady who's completely in touch with everybody on the same devices that they're in touch with her. It's crazy. I mean, I've noticed even some of the granular details of the shadows. Exactly. Right? So what we had to do... The flares that are striking across the screens. What's really crazy about this is when you put it together, obviously there's huge desire to make it real. But the funny thing is, sometimes you've actually got to make it not too real for it to look real. So we have the hand on the left was a little too straight on, so we have to twist it a little bit and put some skewing on it to give it a sense of depth. And then the idea with the flare is to look like lights are bouncing off the screens. People are casting shadows. Obviously we had a lot of shadows that we could use as references. But I think there was something like 200 or 300 layers in this by the time we finished. It was a hard time tracking down which screen was on which phone, which belonged to which hand, which person, which side. But we got there in the end. We have another question coming in. The question was, 60 frames per second was a choice? Which I don't know if that was some shade thrown at 60 FPS. Absolutely deservedly so. That was a lot of thoughts. A little too crispy for me. A little too crispy. I'd rather shoot at 24. But no, 60 is actually a major choice we made because in headsets especially, the experience goes way up. You're able to actually feel like you're moving around a little bit more naturally than you would see stuttering if you're turning quickly. So we wanted to bake this as forward as possible so this is something that can live in the next couple of months as headsets start to become more available to the public. And into the future where there are years where hopefully everyone is in headsets. I don't know. I'm really into VR. We're all in headsets right now. We're never going to go out again. Yeah, it's going to be great. We're never going to leave the house. So yeah, it was definitely a choice and it was definitely a choice mostly for future. But right now, YouTube plays it. Facebook is locked at 30 frames per second. So if we can get there, we'll be at that probably. Any other questions? What did Michelle think about being filmed in 360? I don't know. James, what do you think? I think she loved it. And I photographed a lot of people over the years. I know you guys have set up a lot of productions over the years and I think we were all blown away. How this is we're dealing with Secret Service. We're dealing with the White House. We're dealing with an incredibly short timeline and they were just so helpful and she was just so into it. She just she loved it. Her team loved it. You know, it's it's a challenge because 360 shows everything and everybody's on camera for the entire duration. So it's it's a lot of moving past to think about. Nobody's ever had to. And I was locked outside. I didn't even get to see it. I saw the film the same time everybody else did. We showed people in the White House with the goggles, right? Yeah, they were like the headset. Yeah, that's that's something that we realized is like so many people we're in this very like sphere, pardon the pun, of like people who are up on Oculus and understand VR is a thing that's coming out. But the vast majority of the world out there has never gotten to see this. It's never going to experience that. Even people in our office would put on the headset and be like, whoa, this is not what I expected at all. Which is really tough, which is really tough to gauge if people liked it or if it's just like their first experience. But I'll take it. It's the hardest thing with this entire project. This is obviously taking a while. We've been looking at pictures. We've been looking at you guys over and over and you lose that sense of detachment from it. You're like, is this good? Is this bad? We don't know anymore. And getting somebody to sit down with that headset on or to view it on a phone and see their reactions for the first time was like, wow, this is actually something pretty incredible. Right. We just got to keep keep track of that. So going back to your image, you come up with this idea of, OK, it's paparazzi thing. Yes. The people of paparazzi. These cameras all in their place. And then I noticed at if you scroll to the bottom of the post, there's a note of the photograph. It's right there. There we see the reverse, right? This is the selfie mode. Yes. And I think this was like a counteract to that opening, that lead picture. We also didn't want to crop everything. So it's an orange background. We went we took this roll of paper to the White House. The White House puts the top hall in down and the carpet and just wanted to get this shot with her team. This is a real team. And they did this picture. You can see it in the lead picture, the lead VR at the beginning. And the crazy thing about this shot is this is one frame. So this one deliberately no heads have been added, moved or changed. This is just a simple bit of cleanup. The first lady was standing on some tape at the bottom, which we just edited that out. But really, that's the only bit of retouching on this. Everything else is a single shot. And I think it was kind of nice to see the lights, to see the stands, to get the hint of that incredible portrait of Lincoln on the left. Unfortunately, and rather stupidly, I managed to cut off. But it's such a sort of juxtaposition to the strong backgrounds throughout the piece and obviously that opening image. So it's nice to have both. You have that balance. I mean, it's doing a photo shoot, it's like doing a video. There's an edit to it. You've got to have that idea of what the flow is going to be on the page and how people are going to react to the different pictures. Is that good? They were very patient. They really seemed to enjoy it as well. They were acting nicely. To be fair, when you take pictures, it's quite a shout. Yes. Fantastic. Fantastic. Yes, I will never ever say that word ever again. Just go and watch the first five seconds of the video. James is the star. I think that's for 20 minutes. 20 minutes. It's fantastic, your word of choice. I heard the words and I said it. Until I watched the video, I was going, oh my God, do I sound like that? I was mortified, but hey, I got pictures of whatever it takes to make that. Well, fantastic. I think we should probably wrap up. Yes. Yes. So yes, unless anyone has any questions within our team, we're going to ask. When do we start the next one, guys? That was one of the first comments that came in. It scared the crap out of me. What do you mean? How hard can it be? I would like to sleep for a day or two. Yes, there's a lot of sleeping that needs to take place. I will say this. It's definitely like, and I want to make it clear, it was a good learning experience for us. I feel way more confident going into any of your production now. Absolutely. I wouldn't even say it anymore. I think that's something you're definitely going to see from the future for us. Do you know what I want to see? You know what's going to be the next step is when you can move that camera around. Oh, you can. Oh, you can. You can carry it. Put that on a dolly. Just wait. Just wait. Let's continue. Put it on a car. Shout out to Total Cinema 360, Craig Gilbert, Lucas Wilson of Super Spirit Productions, and John via camera for lending your services and your technology. None of this would have happened if we didn't have you guys as our production partners. So big thank you and until the next one. Thanks for watching. Thank you.
 Hello world! Welcome. We're in the queue from the Verge office recording live.
 Following up with our release of Michelle Obama 360. I'm assuming most of you guys are watching because you had a chance to watch the video.
 And if you haven't, then you should certainly go to youtube.com or slash the Verge and check it out because it's incredible. It's amazing.
 It's insane. It's pretty great. We're all very happy.
 Anyway, so I'm Trey Shallehore, producer for the Verge Video team. I am here with Rael Nielsen, director of Verge Video.
 Tom Connors, senior director, mastermind behind this project. And James Barham, art director.
 Also photographer who took these stunning portraits of the lovely Michelle Obama.
 So we're going to kind of keep this short and simple. We really want to target a lot of questions involving post-production.
 How did we pull this off? A lot of our colleagues have been curious about this.
 My friends have been texting me since the release of this, have been curious about this.
 And so this is an opportunity for us to sort of step behind the scenes and share with you guys what happened.
 So I think we should just jump into the background. How did we conceive this idea? How did we conceptualize this idea?
 Yeah, well, yeah, we found out we were going to do this at CES this year, which was a terrible time to find out of it.
 But we threw the idea out there and the White House is very receptive to the idea of us doing this in 360.
 So we got partnered with John and some other producers to actually make this in 360, capturing it.
 And then that was kind of the easy part. Shooting in 360 is not actually that difficult.
 You set the camera down and you turn it on and it goes. It worked.
 And then the post-production side of things was when we really took our time trying to craft our story
 and figure out all the sort of creative avenues we wanted to do, because 360 is a very new type of medium for us to live in.
 And using it, at least for me in the past, I've always had a lot of trouble with 360 content because it is so far away from the person.
 I feel like you lose the chance to actually engage. Like, I'm very close to Trey and James and Miriam right now.
 I can see their face and I can see their expression and I understand exactly what's going on with them.
 But a lot of times in 360, you're seven, six feet away from the camera and you're very, very small and you don't get that.
 So a big design thing that we wanted to figure out with this piece is how do we inject that into a 360 interview in a way that feels natural and seamless
 and doesn't take you out of it, but when it does, it is informative and growing the piece.
 Absolutely. And I want to also state for the record that this is The Verge and Vox Media's first 360 project.
 It was a really ambitious first start.
 It was a very ambitious launch to do 360 when we have such a high profile subject to go with, right?
 I believe we've been trying to do some sort of 360 content for a really long time now.
 And I think the first thing I said talking about it was let's not do it on anything really important so we can learn on an easy thing.
 And we didn't do that.
 They were talking to the White House and they were like, oh, let's do it in 360.
 I mean, the whole thing about this is like you said, you can't move the camera and it all happened so fast.
 And it's the White House and you've got to get that entire crew in there.
 And I mean, it has to be said that the White House were incredible.
 They were so supportive, so easy to work for.
 And, you know, from the photo shoot side, what we were thinking about is how, okay, it's not enough just to go and stick a 360 camera there.
 We've got to take pictures. There's got to be a story about it.
 And so I think from when we were working it out, we came up with the selfie idea.
 We did some tests. The White House loved it.
 And we went off to do it. But the thing that was so important is we had to do this for real.
 We had to take that orange background to the White House.
 We had to set it up. We had to get that real, her real team there and to sort of show the background because otherwise it would have looked like we shot it in the studio.
 So from a design standpoint, why the orange?
 It's the verge orange, right?
 And it's just, you know, it's a lovely color. It's warm. It's bright. It's crisp.
 And the other thing was, you know, this is an opportunity to photograph Michelle Obama, the first lady, in a way that's never been done before.
 We don't want this to look like a good housekeeping cover or something else.
 This had to be for us. We had to own it.
 And what better way to own it is to embed the color of the verge in the very pictures.
 They're not going to work anywhere else.
 That's what was so important, I think.
 Absolutely. Absolutely.
 Yeah. And I mean, you can see it makes her truly pop out, right?
 It's like a warm summer day.
 But it wasn't. It was January and it was freezing.
 And I, if everybody remembers, spent 50 minutes outside of the main security while I had a little bit of an instance to get into the White House.
 But they let me in and they were very nice. And thank you very much.
 It was just too charming to not let in.
 So, yeah. So, you know, we came up with this idea of shooting it in 360.
 We came up with the idea of bringing in our verge orange into the White House and kind of creating this really cool hip look, right?
 So take me through some of the ideas.
 First, I guess let's talk about video. 360 with motion graphics and animation sounds pretty crazy.
 I imagine that the process of how do you take the space and incorporate graphics so they're not super jarring or really wacky.
 How how how did you maintain this consistency and look and flow?
 Right. So and animation, I think the main sort of idea that I always kind of came up with and I'll throw credit where credit is due to our past alum, Phil Robibro, who made a series for us called The Big Future, where we had interviewed Bill Gates in a regular interview.
 And he took that interview footage mixed with a little bit of a video script and made these really beautiful motion graphics that helped take a standard interview and expand it out into this big sort of infographic explainer video on a subject with an interviewer.
 And it was really great. It was really inspiring to this piece, which was, OK, can we take that?
 Can we take that feel and incorporate that into a 360 space, taking away sort of that, oh, you're just in one room and there's only one thing to look at and you get bored after you kind of looked around for a little bit.
 Here we've injected things for you to look at as much as it makes sense.
 And actually, so talking about process for doing it, I'm going to shift over to Miriam a little bit because she was the integral in figuring out all the technical things of this.
 And yeah, let's bring up After Effects and just kind of look at this for a second.
 So to get you an idea of kind of the scale of it, our main comp has 129 layers all moving around at once.
 So forgive my tiny little laptop if it is creaking along trying to keep up.
 So what our main workhorse when we did this was this software called Metal, which allows you to take 2D animations and bring them into the 360 space.
 So if you look at this little phone on the side up here, if I take off the Metal programming, it turns it.
 It's hard to see because the screen is so small, but it turns it all flat and it will look very strange in the preview player.
 Is this on the right time code at all?
 Let's clean back up real fast here.
 Can you explain how the idea of what something called an echo-rectangular view is?
 For sure.
 Okay, so the easiest way to think about echo-rectangular projection is kind of like the classic world map you see where it's got like Greenland super massive in the top
 and kind of all the other countries kind of normal spaced along the equator.
 Because what it does is it takes a globe, which is a sphere, and kind of peels apart the top of the globe and makes it really wide.
 So if you look at this image of the room we have here, you can see the chandelier is massive and all of the production equipment on the bottom is stretched out huge.
 Whereas if you look at the interview, it's pretty close to being...
 Right.
 When you go in here, you can... It's so slow. If you go in here, you can look down and see that it's all right in this little clump.
 And this is a metal thing that's using cameras in After Effects to sort of create an approximation of how that will look once it's all stitched together.
 So the idea is you take that flat image and software that you uploaded to YouTube, Facebook, hopefully you can get that, send that up to them.
 And they will take that square and then wrap it into a circle through programming, and that's what allows you to spin around later.
 Yeah, and so metal kind of workhorses it and takes 2D objects that you put in that are normally in regular flat and transforms them and warps them so that they have this curve, which when you put them into 360 view...
 Come on, computer, you can do it. I believe in you.
 You can then turn around and see them.
 And I think that was, to me, that was a really surprising thing that it actually...
 I think going into this, we had anticipated, oh man, we are going to be editing in 360. This is going to be a much more complicated process.
 But really, it was pretty much the same as editing a 2D process.
 You're still editing in a rectangle. It's a 2 to 1 ratio instead of a 16, 9 that we're used to.
 But everything else was the same. We animate on there and metal and how you do wipes just translates to 360.
 So you start to sort of be able to look at that ecto rectangular stretch out thing and kind of see how it makes sense in 360, in animating in 360.
 So it was actually like super fun to put in all these graphics and get to see them in there and then realize that it wasn't actually that difficult to do.
 No, I mean, because you're basically still editing the same way.
 It's just you have to be a little more conscious about cuts and whatnot because this can feel super jarring.
 So at any point, did you need to edit with a headset?
 Or can you edit with a headset? Or does it all happen in 2D?
 The easiest way to edit is in 2D, for sure.
 There are a couple of plug-ins that give you headsets, but not for After Effects, right?
 Not that we have the runs.
 Yeah, right, right. So in the future, I can't wait to edit in VR. Editing in VR is going to be the best.
 If you give me a keyboard that I can strap to my chair and I mouse it, I can just wirelessly turn, I'll edit for days. It'll be great.
 The funny thing, the whole thing with this video is once you put on a headset, it completely makes sense.
 When we got into the VR room and put this headset on, apart from tying myself in complete knots with the cable of the headset, because it kept spinning around all the time, it was amazing.
 Yeah, and that's part of the design we talked about when we were coming up with the idea for these animations and what they would look like.
 That was something we talked about. How does the design of these push you in certain directions?
 Because part of 360 is you want to give people the ability to look anywhere they want and follow their interest in any way and reward them for looking at it, reward them for checking things out.
 Even the setup of how we set up the shot, we wanted to have cameras there to do those cutaways, but we also wanted interesting things.
 So if you watch the video, I want a slider bouncing back and forth the entire time.
 We used that shot once in the piece and I wasn't super into the shot, but it gives some action to that background.
 Staging that out is part of how we conceptualize this whole thing.
 You wanted to be able to look at, because we very easily could have taken us out of that room entirely and left you in an empty room.
 Actually, Miriam, do you want to explain the crazy cheat we figured out for this?
 Because cutting is so jarring, and obviously this interview is about 20 minutes long?
 It was about a 20 minute interview that we cut down to 10 minutes.
 There are some cuts and we've hidden them in a bunch of different ways, but the easiest way we did to hide it was we took just a straight 10 minutes of the background of all of us crew hanging out and ended up masking it out so that the background never cuts at all.
 We have... let's see if we can get it to show up.
 More sound effects, please.
 Load computer, you can do it.
 Actually, while this loads, this might be a good time, speaking of sound effects, to bring in our sound guy.
 Come on over.
 I'm going to actually hop out and let him sit here.
 I can come back if you want, but if you don't want to...
 If anyone has any questions about the photography for this entire production, please start dropping them in.
 And once we get to the question and answer part of this at the end, we'll bring James back.
 He'll be very happy to answer all of them.
 So Miriam, show us what's happening here.
 So I've got a pretty standard thing in After Effects where I have duplicates of the main video layer.
 But one of them has this great mask on it, which, if I turn it on, you can no longer see the First Lady and Neli and Caroline Adler
 because we've masked out a video of just the background of all of us for the 10-minute long of the video.
 But then behind that, I have their video with the appropriate cuts.
 And so we've found a way to hide those cuts within that tiny sphere, but we didn't have to worry about hiding all the cuts of us.
 Because when you cut everything around you, it becomes very disorienting.
 Tom jumps like 10 meters.
 Yeah, especially me because I'm jumping.
 But this was a way for us to draw your attention away from the center of the screen where we could cut that.
 And then the next stage for that, so figuring out, okay, how do we cut without wiping to a full graphic?
 Because if we wiped to a full graphic the entire time, it would get impossible to watch.
 So the idea was, how do we keep you in this room but do that?
 And our first thought was, oh, well, we'll just blur out the background and make the graphics feel like they're a little bit closer.
 Actually, before we get into this, let's actually introduce Andrew, who's been sitting here quietly.
 Andrew Marino, ladies and gentlemen, sound designer, extraordinaire.
 And sound recordist.
 And sound recordist.
 You'll see him in the video.
 He's got like a frame handle.
 Right side of the frame, holding the bag.
 Yeah.
 There he is.
 That's cute.
 So Andrew, we have your attention.
 So tell us a little bit about, you know, what was the motivation behind the sound design?
 Well, the motivation was the animations, obviously.
 You kind of get the sort of feel of what do you want the sound to sound like by the kind of feel of the animation.
 So there's like, it's like a little cartoony but not overly so, you know, where it's not silly.
 I didn't want to make it silly.
 I wanted to make it like virtual reality.
 So it's like sci-fi.
 I kind of wanted to get a lot of sciency noises in there.
 Yeah.
 Now, is it true, there's a rumor going around, that you recorded some live sounds?
 Yeah, there's a few.
 And used them throughout the piece?
 Yeah, there's a few live sounds.
 I couldn't, I compiled a bunch of library sounds that we already had.
 Stuff that I couldn't find online or in our sound library.
 I had to replicate one of them being the tire in the video when it goes all around your head.
 We were looking for a tire in the office and there was like a hand truck we had to use.
 But yeah, we also have Miriam, there's a little like Easter egg, Miriam makes a little sound effect noise.
 Yeah, like that.
 So if you can hear it around there, it's in the beginning, there's one in the beginning.
 Yeah, I think you can find it if you try to harp.
 Yeah, especially, we got the chance to view this in the Vive headset a lot.
 And it was a great experience when you put headphones on and have those sound effects, it's really fully immersive and it really makes it come together.
 Yeah, I really recommend listening to it on headphones.
 It's a plea from an audio guy.
 Don't watch it on mute like this.
 Yeah.
 Cool, okay, so Miriam, let's get back to this.
 Can I just say like I'm learning this as these people are, like I didn't know that was how you did that.
 Yeah.
 That was a really cool idea.
 So yeah, so let's talk about, so we've basically taken this extra rectangular version, we've removed them and now we have graphics coming up, taking over.
 But what we kind of figured out is if you put a solid color up in 360, you're just looking at blankness.
 Like there's no sense of space, there's no sense of like depth that you get when you have the footage of the room.
 So a lot of the things we were playing with was gradients and putting stuff over top of that.
 But obviously if you put a gradient over top of that, you're not doing yourself a favor with hiding a cut.
 So how did we do that then?
 Well, I mean, for a lot of ways we kind of blurred them out behind the graphics, but there's a nice mathematical theory out there called the hairball theory.
 That if you blur out the background, the way you blur is by grabbing pixels from around it and overlaying them with a slight shifting effect.
 And so what that does is where the scene comes together, where the 360 video is nice and stitched up, it screws with that.
 So suddenly you have a weird line in the back.
 So you can't blur the whole image.
 So essentially what happens is when you're blurring, you have the edges, all the edges of the frame blur the pixels, but there's nothing to blur past the frame.
 So it ends up blurring blackness, which means you get lines.
 Well, you get two points on the top.
 Yeah, you get two points on top and in extreme cases, you can get a line down the whole back where the footage pins together.
 And so we solved that by only simply blurring out a mask of the front of it.
 So there you can kind of see through the blur the cuts, but it gets to kind of accept that it's happening.
 But if you turn around when the graphics are blurred, you'll see Craig from Dolce & Gabbana just completely in focus, just watching us all go down while everyone else is blurred out and the cut happens.
 But the great thing about VR and 360 captures is it's actually really easy to hide things because you can direct people's attention other ways.
 So when these cuts happen, one of the sort of ideas with the graphics was that we'll take you away from that.
 We're going to take you over here to watch a video.
 We're going to take you beyond where this cut is happening or beyond where something's not going quite right with the stitch.
 Like, you'll know if you look really hard, I'm like disappearing in places, but that and like it's really easy to hide those things because you have a full way of creating a language that pushes you.
 So like one thing about the motion graphics that we worked for was a sense of flow, a sense of movement.
 So we have these lines that push in one way.
 We have these sort of swiggles that push in different directions and that helps draw your attention to things, helps draw your attention from her to these things and keep you in that way while we just cut right there and you never have a chance to see.
 Right.
 Giving away all the secrets.
 Yeah.
 So that's hope and like and that's the big thing I want to say to everyone is that this stuff is actually really easy.
 It's very much just like creating video in Premiere or anything like that.
 In fact, how we export it and how we did a lot of what we did for this piece was all in Premiere.
 And we didn't need After Effects to do this.
 You could definitely make 360 video in Premiere or any editing software.
 And Metal just released stuff for Premiere so you can start doing some of these things with 2D graphics in Premiere without even going to After Effects now.
 And even without a software like Metal, which I think is about $100, $200.
 Yeah, it ranges for the studio versus.
 Yeah, but these are this is math.
 If you look hard enough, you can know exactly where to place it and move it.
 It just makes it a lot easier and saves you a lot of time.
 That's true.
 You can definitely do it all on your own.
 I think we should open it up to some questions.
 I know I saw one question about what camera we used to shoot on.
 We shot with two cameras, but our primary camera was the Jon VR camera.
 Courtesy of Jon VR.
 And we worked with producer Lucas Wilson from Super Superior Productions.
 And if you get a chance to look at the Jon camera, it looks like what you think a 360 camera.
 It looks like a Death Star.
 It looks like a Death Star.
 That was the running joke during production was that we were filming with the miniature Death Star.
 Yeah, it's really it's pretty intimidating.
 There's definitely some extraterrestrial life forms that are about to shoot out of that thing.
 We used the primary camera as the Jon VR camera and our backup camera was courtesy of Total Cinema 360.
 Which you can see throughout the whole video.
 If the graphics will go away.
 Wait for that container to light.
 It's going to be a little bit.
 There it is.
 It's right here.
 This little dude.
 It's actually for a 7S's strap.
 So is that the one we used in the beginning?
 Yeah, so the opening shot of the photo shoot is based off of Total Cinema's prototype.
 And also the credits, the end credits.
 The shot of us gathering around Michelle to take the Jon camera.
 So that's the Jon photo and then this footage is from Total Cinema's prototype.
 Here we are, so happy.
 Oh, nothing.
 What other questions do we have?
 Any other questions?
 What did Golden Shore find in the 360 video to overcome to be sustainable?
 It's a good question.
 I think access is a big thing.
 I think we're all unconvinced that watching it on a desktop is the best experience.
 I think the adoption of headsets, more and more adoption of headsets will make it a much more viable thing.
 Because in the future.
 You can't watch it in a headset if you don't have one.
 It looks fantastic.
 Get cool cardboard.
 It's very cheap and very easy to do.
 Also mixing in a headset, going back and looking at it would help so much more.
 Direct sound effects.
 That's something you ran into with sound.
 Right now, other than some proprietary players, you can't do 3D audio.
 Essentially you can map audio so you can hear and get the sense that it's here, get the sense that it's over here.
 But in both YouTube and any other player that's for the masses right now, you can't turn your head and have that turn with you.
 It's off-putting, but that's the future.
 You want to be able to look and see that this little effect up here is making a noise and you can follow that effect around.
 I didn't want to make things too stereo.
 When you went 180, the sound effect was still on your left side when you're facing the opposite way.
 I wanted to make it so it pans towards the direction it's going, the animation.
 But once you turn your head, I pan it back to center so it feels like it's tracking your head.
 But it's just a little... You just have to move your head that way.
 The other thing beyond just being able to see it that I think pitfalls for 360 video is it's very much a different medium than just video.
 You have to think about it like that.
 Yeah, absolutely.
 Because the future for this isn't the same as film because you can't get close.
 We did that for this video because we have the ability to add in graphics like that.
 But if you want to tell a story about someone, you're never actually going to get very close.
 You have the great ability of putting people in their shoes.
 I got to see at one point someone did a short film of putting you in the view.
 I don't know if anyone who did this and it might be half lies.
 But let's say hypothetically someone made a video where it actually puts you into the viewpoint of a doctor first.
 And you went through this checking a patient out.
 And then the next time they cut, you're all of a sudden the patient and getting checked out by a doctor who thought you were just unconscious.
 But you could see and move around and look and feel like you were not being noticed.
 And that's something that I think speaks to the power of 360 video is giving you those kinds of experiences.
 But not necessarily…it's not going to give you that same kind of closeness that video does.
 We don't get that close up.
 It just reminded me of a film actually that would have been powerful in 360 or VR rather.
 It's Dive and Bell and the Butterfly.
 Anyone seen this film?
 No.
 Oh, guys.
 Oh, no.
 Sorry.
 No, it's fine.
 Okay, great.
 Thanks, guys.
 Film buffs here.
 All right.
 Good.
 There's a film up here at Sundance.
 Reggie Watts was in it.
 It's a VR film.
 And in the film, he puts on a VR headset while you're in VR.
 I think that's a crazy thing.
 I think that works.
 So another great question actually I'm reading right now.
 How much did teaching the viewer how to interact with the experience come into play?
 It was a big deal in concepting, like specifically the Vine Q&A section of the video.
 So there's a section of the video where we're showing off Michelle Obama's Vine Q&A that she did.
 So she would put out questions to the world and kids, adults would ask her things and she'd respond.
 And VR gives us a great chance to make you watch one of those and then shift your focus with this ball that we kind of have.
 And big shout out to Lunar North, which was the production team that came in to help us design this work.
 And it turned out incredible.
 And animated.
 And animated, yeah.
 It's an absolutely incredible execution of what we were thinking of and I couldn't be more proud of them.
 It's because of the use of shapes, right?
 A lot of, if you scroll through the piece, you see a lot of circles and all these dotted lines as well.
 And then squares and the containers.
 And the idea is use those circles as these guides, right?
 These markers to sort of bring you through the space and direct your attention to specific points within the space.
 And then you also use the dotted lines to accent where the direction you should be turning.
 So you see a lot of that, a lot of play with these sort of basic shapes throughout the piece.
 Yeah, and a lot of the transitions that wipe across the whole screen end up on whoever is talking next.
 Which is a really nice direction where you follow the movement.
 Right.
 Actually, I have a question for James Barham, photographer.
 Can I have a seat?
 Sure.
 Can we squeeze all of them?
 Yeah, squeeze all of them in here.
 So James, going back to the lead image, how did you manage to get those phones so close to Michelle's face?
 I mean, I get uncomfortable just looking at this photo and thinking, wow.
 There's a camera, you know, a foot away from Michelle.
 Well, the crazy thing about this is I remember we had the first meeting and everything was happening so fast.
 Got on the subway to come up to the office and drew a sketch of a load of people holding phones up to the first lady.
 And we got here and thought, how the hell are we going to do this?
 Because we had 20 minutes with her.
 So the first shot, this was always going to be a comp.
 And so what we did is we actually did a test shoot.
 You remember?
 We went downstairs.
 We tried to figure it out.
 Everybody held out their phones and we did the shot.
 And then when we came back from the shoot, obviously we had the pictures of the first lady.
 We had the background.
 We brought the background with us.
 And then we went down to the studio and using a stand with a big blue balloon on it, we got everybody to stand in groups and hold their phones up.
 And the important thing here is, if I may stand, was to get the depth around it because obviously this is 360.
 I mean, this isn't 360, but we wanted the piece in both terms of the design and also these pictures to have that sense.
 So we just worked our way through building up.
 There are groups of people here.
 We shot individuals and then just spent a lot of time comping it all together to make it look as real as possible.
 And I think to just really convey that this is the first lady who's completely in touch with everybody on the same devices that they're in touch with her.
 It's crazy.
 I mean, I've noticed even some of the granular details of the shadows.
 Exactly.
 Right?
 So what we had to do...
 The flares that are striking across the screens.
 What's really crazy about this is when you put it together, obviously there's huge desire to make it real.
 But the funny thing is, sometimes you've actually got to make it not too real for it to look real.
 So we have the hand on the left was a little too straight on, so we have to twist it a little bit and put some skewing on it to give it a sense of depth.
 And then the idea with the flare is to look like lights are bouncing off the screens.
 People are casting shadows.
 Obviously we had a lot of shadows that we could use as references.
 But I think there was something like 200 or 300 layers in this by the time we finished.
 It was a hard time tracking down which screen was on which phone, which belonged to which hand, which person, which side.
 But we got there in the end.
 We have another question coming in.
 The question was, 60 frames per second was a choice?
 Which I don't know if that was some shade thrown at 60 FPS.
 Absolutely deservedly so.
 That was a lot of thoughts.
 A little too crispy for me.
 A little too crispy.
 I'd rather shoot at 24.
 But no, 60 is actually a major choice we made because in headsets especially, the experience goes way up.
 You're able to actually feel like you're moving around a little bit more naturally than you would see stuttering if you're turning quickly.
 So we wanted to bake this as forward as possible so this is something that can live in the next couple of months as headsets start to become more available to the public.
 And into the future where there are years where hopefully everyone is in headsets.
 I don't know.
 I'm really into VR.
 We're all in headsets right now.
 We're never going to go out again.
 Yeah, it's going to be great.
 We're never going to leave the house.
 So yeah, it was definitely a choice and it was definitely a choice mostly for future.
 But right now, YouTube plays it.
 Facebook is locked at 30 frames per second.
 So if we can get there, we'll be at that probably.
 Any other questions?
 What did Michelle think about being filmed in 360?
 I don't know.
 James, what do you think?
 I think she loved it.
 And I photographed a lot of people over the years.
 I know you guys have set up a lot of productions over the years and I think we were all blown away.
 How this is we're dealing with Secret Service.
 We're dealing with the White House.
 We're dealing with an incredibly short timeline and they were just so helpful and she was just so into it.
 She just she loved it.
 Her team loved it.
 You know, it's it's a challenge because 360 shows everything and everybody's on camera for the entire duration.
 So it's it's a lot of moving past to think about.
 Nobody's ever had to. And I was locked outside.
 I didn't even get to see it.
 I saw the film the same time everybody else did.
 We showed people in the White House with the goggles, right?
 Yeah, they were like the headset.
 Yeah, that's that's something that we realized is like so many people we're in this very like sphere, pardon the pun, of like people who are up on Oculus and understand VR is a thing that's coming out.
 But the vast majority of the world out there has never gotten to see this.
 It's never going to experience that.
 Even people in our office would put on the headset and be like, whoa, this is not what I expected at all.
 Which is really tough, which is really tough to gauge if people liked it or if it's just like their first experience.
 But I'll take it.
 It's the hardest thing with this entire project.
 This is obviously taking a while.
 We've been looking at pictures. We've been looking at you guys over and over and you lose that sense of detachment from it.
 You're like, is this good? Is this bad? We don't know anymore.
 And getting somebody to sit down with that headset on or to view it on a phone and see their reactions for the first time was like, wow, this is actually something pretty incredible.
 Right. We just got to keep keep track of that.
 So going back to your image, you come up with this idea of, OK, it's paparazzi thing.
 Yes.
 The people of paparazzi.
 These cameras all in their place. And then I noticed at if you scroll to the bottom of the post, there's a note of the photograph.
 It's right there.
 There we see the reverse, right? This is the selfie mode.
 Yes. And I think this was like a counteract to that opening, that lead picture.
 We also didn't want to crop everything. So it's an orange background.
 We went we took this roll of paper to the White House.
 The White House puts the top hall in down and the carpet and just wanted to get this shot with her team.
 This is a real team. And they did this picture. You can see it in the lead picture, the lead VR at the beginning.
 And the crazy thing about this shot is this is one frame.
 So this one deliberately no heads have been added, moved or changed.
 This is just a simple bit of cleanup.
 The first lady was standing on some tape at the bottom, which we just edited that out.
 But really, that's the only bit of retouching on this. Everything else is a single shot.
 And I think it was kind of nice to see the lights, to see the stands, to get the hint of that incredible portrait of Lincoln on the left.
 Unfortunately, and rather stupidly, I managed to cut off.
 But it's such a sort of juxtaposition to the strong backgrounds throughout the piece and obviously that opening image.
 So it's nice to have both. You have that balance.
 I mean, it's doing a photo shoot, it's like doing a video. There's an edit to it.
 You've got to have that idea of what the flow is going to be on the page and how people are going to react to the different pictures.
 Is that good?
 They were very patient.
 They really seemed to enjoy it as well. They were acting nicely.
 To be fair, when you take pictures, it's quite a shout.
 Yes.
 Fantastic.
 Fantastic.
 Yes, I will never ever say that word ever again.
 Just go and watch the first five seconds of the video.
 James is the star.
 I think that's for 20 minutes.
 20 minutes.
 It's fantastic, your word of choice.
 I heard the words and I said it.
 Until I watched the video, I was going, oh my God, do I sound like that?
 I was mortified, but hey, I got pictures of whatever it takes to make that.
 Well, fantastic. I think we should probably wrap up.
 Yes.
 Yes.
 So yes, unless anyone has any questions within our team, we're going to ask.
 When do we start the next one, guys?
 That was one of the first comments that came in.
 It scared the crap out of me.
 What do you mean? How hard can it be?
 I would like to sleep for a day or two.
 Yes, there's a lot of sleeping that needs to take place.
 I will say this.
 It's definitely like, and I want to make it clear, it was a good learning experience for us.
 I feel way more confident going into any of your production now.
 Absolutely.
 I wouldn't even say it anymore.
 I think that's something you're definitely going to see from the future for us.
 Do you know what I want to see?
 You know what's going to be the next step is when you can move that camera around.
 Oh, you can.
 Oh, you can.
 You can carry it.
 Put that on a dolly.
 Just wait.
 Just wait.
 Let's continue.
 Put it on a car.
 Shout out to Total Cinema 360, Craig Gilbert, Lucas Wilson of Super Spirit Productions,
 and John via camera for lending your services and your technology.
 None of this would have happened if we didn't have you guys as our production partners.
 So big thank you and until the next one.
 Thanks for watching.
 Thank you.