Using VR as a medium can bring your viewer into a particular story.
It sort of gives you this incredible opportunity to either
bring your audience into a space that they wouldn't normally be
or to bring a character into the audience's world.
I always say that VR filmmaking isn't storytelling it's story living.
I'm Mary Matheson, I'm a VR director, and today we're shooting with the Canon
EOS R5, paired with the RF 5.2mm
F2.8L DUAL FISHEYE lens.
When we're looking for a story to tell in VR, we're really looking for something
where we're going to be able to use the space
and this incredible frame that we're going to have.
Grandmaster Sken has an incredible story.
His father was killed when he was a young boy,
and he ended up being mentored by this Buddhist monk, and he grew up
in this temple with a Buddhist monk and ended up using Muay Thai fighting
as a way to survive economically, but also to pay for his own education.
He went to university and now he's sort of worked
his way up to become this Grandmaster.
I knew that this would be really brilliant in VR
because I knew that we could use the the full frame that we'd have with 180
to sort of show off the kicks that he can do, the punches.
I mean, they sort of fly through the air.
I work really closely with Richard, who's my DOP on most of my projects.
What we usually do is I come up with a crazy idea
and then he tries to help me work it out.
Hi, I'm Richard Stegmann, and I'm a DOP in the VR sphere.
Mary and I have worked on a number of projects together
in some amazing places, telling amazing stories.
We've chosen three different locations to tell Master Sken's story.
The first one was this forest, which we knew was going to give us
incredible colour and also incredible detail
with the green moss and the leaves.
But then we also chose the gym because we wanted to use the 180 degree VR
to get really up close and personal with the fighters as they were fighting.
So the third location was this incredible
gymnasium where he was teaching young people how to do Muay Thai.
Working in 180 provides us
with a lot more ease in terms of grip capabilities
because we have half the sphere to to hide away in.
With 360, for example, we often have to as directors
or DOPs, we have to hide from the setting completely.
The thing that excites me most about 180 VR is the fact that we can film
observational documentary in a much more natural way.
Shooting a stereoscopic image
gives the viewer a far more immersive experience because it's natural,
we all have two eyes, we all see things with depth
and providing that information to the viewer enhances the experience.
Traditionally, shooting stereoscopic VR material can be quite complex,
and we also have issues with coming very close to the camera.
Now, with the dual lens from Canon, we're able to come as close
as 20 centimetres to the camera.
You can literally see the three dimensions of very close up objects.
So for me, that's what sort of gives
your audience the sense of feeling that they're right in that scene.
The DUAL FISHEYE lens from Canon
provides us with an opportunity to get in a very compact form factor.
The ability to capture stereo imagery
onto a single sensor, giving us one file
that's perfectly in sync, which is amazing when one
when one's working with stereo information because
if there's any kind of sync issues between those two shots,
you have a lot of trouble further down the line in post-production.
Not only is this an amazing stereoscopic lens, but it's also very fast.
It's 2.8, which gives us the ability to work in low light conditions,
obviously, coupled with the R5's full frame sensor gives us amazing performance.
Canon have tackled this with a complete ecosystem, from the dual
lens capture to the full frame of the R5
to using the the EOS VR Utility,
which takes into account all the metadata that's captured and provides us
with an amazing picture that we can then bring into post-production.
In brighter conditions, there's the ability to put in
ND filters on the rear of the lens covering those bases as well.
Another great thing about this system is that we can use the EOS Utility
to view the equirectangular projection in real time.
I've been using Canon Camera Connect to monitor the images in a way
that has just really helped me to work at a much faster rate.
I've really loved working with Sken.
He was such a gracious person to work with and incredibly giving,
but I also loved playing with 180 degree
VR and showing off both what he can do as well as what this lens can do.