Hey guys, it’s GabaVR,
I’m a 360 content creator and photographer publishing 360 contents and tutorials on YouTube.
In one of my previous videos I showed you how you can shoot and edit professional bullet time videos.
You know, it’s a slow-mo effect we can achieve by using a 360 camera and a string or a bullet time handle.
In the previous tutorial I showed you the overall workflow to get the best quality out of it
with a straight horizon line in your video.
If you missed that episode watch it first, then continue with this one,
because now I won’t talk about the basics so much,
but I show you 3 further tricks to solve one of the biggest problems of this technique.
You know when we’re shooting a bullet time video with a 360 camera
we have to raise one of our hands to spin the camera, and this can be a problem in several cases.
Or I could say, it’s okay to apply this effect as a short b-roll scene in a travel video,
but in other cases it may look weird.
Previously I was talking about a couple of solutions, like holding an air balloon in hand
or holding some further accessories which ones work well in certain scenes.
This time I show you what we can do in post-production
and which is the coolest accessory we can choose for a bullet time video.
And I share an extra trick with you!
But let’s start with a little editing.
The good news is we don’t have to bother with anything during shooting,
and it takes only a short time to edit our footages.
Here you can see this bullet time scene, which I was shooting during traveling, as a short b-roll.
It could be okay this way, but I decided to pimp it up a little bit, and to create a sparkler effect.
Hopefully it will give a meaning to this hand position, too.
I have already imported my raw insv file into Premiere
and made some basic corrections, like slowing down the video, setting up centre point
and fixing horizon line issues, just like you could see in my previous tutorial.
And now, I add the sparkler effect to give a meaning of this hand position and the handle in my hand.
This time I use a couple of free stock videos.
I don’t need green screen videos,
because I can play around with different blending modes to add flames and sparks.
Actually I will use 2 different sources to create this effect.
First, here is a torch flame with a black background, which will be the base of the effect.
And then I pick up a sparkler, also with a black a background.
I think these two elements will fit together very well.
I start editing with the torch.
I drag the footage over my bullet time video and switch the blending mode to screen.
This way the black background will disappear without having to use any masks or keying.
I resize the flame and move it in the first position.
Then I start creating keyframes, moving the flame all along the scene.
Fortunately the handle is almost in the same position, so it’s quite an easy job.
I think it's really cool, looking like I was holding a torch with a black handle.
And then I repeat almost the same process with the sparkler.
First I remove the black background setting up the blending mode,
and I resize and position this effect, too.
Finally, all I have to do is finishing the animation from keyframe to keyframe.
I think the torch was cool in itself, but combining these two elements looks even better.
Finally I just make the flame of the torch a little bit more saturated
and I add Gaussian blur to blend these elements better in the scene.
It’s not necessary, but I think in this case it looks nice.
In real life I was holding the bullet time handle, but now it looks like was holding a sparkler torch in my hand.
Okay, it’s fine, but what if we create a similar effect in real? Sounds crazy, right?
But now I will play around with a really cool thing we can apply even in commercials and music videos.
And this time it will be 100 percent natural without any editing tricks.
Thanks to the construction of this handle, besides we can turn the camera around us,
we can also mount things on the top of it.
This time I attach a small handmade holder to a tiny smoke bomb.
I bought such a small smoke bomb and I will use a smaller part of it at once.
I put it in this holder on the top of the handle,
I light the smoke bomb and I’m ready to go.
It looks quite similar as the sparkler effect, but it’s even more spectacular and 100% real.
And no one will complain about our hand position in the scene.
It’s obvious, that this is how we hold the smoke bomb, while the camera is panning around us. I love it.
And finally let me show you another trick I learnt from Mic Ty from 360 Rumours.
After I published my bullet time tutorial,
he gave me an idea how we can play around with camera positions during bullet time recording.
So let’s see how it looks like in practice!
All we have to do is inserting a tiny ball head in the structure,
and we can get really nice, lower angle bullet time shots.
This way, the camera won’t be spinning around us above our head, but in exciting lower angles, like this.
And depending on the ball head settings and the length of the selfie stick,
we can get very cool camera movements around us.
Of course we can mix this technique with the smoke bomb or the torch effect
and it will look really-really cool.
I hope you enjoyed these techniques, and you like this short tutorial,
and if you do, please thumbs up.
And for further 360 contents and tutorials, please subscribe to my YouTube channel,
and see you nex time!