A Mammoth Task: Shooting a promo video for CGEye.
It's 8:30 am and I'm outside the gates of Colchester Zoo preparing to film a promo shoot for our Interactive Augmented Reality experience.
I currently work at CGEye Ltd as their Social Media Marketer (I've written another blog post all about that, which you can find here) and am loving it. Last week my job proved even more exciting as I was asked to join them at Colchester Zoo in Essex to help out at the filming of their promotional video for an interactive experience that they have recently developed for the Zoo. I'd never been involved in any kind of filming before - working in a shop or in a school as I have done in the past means that opportunities like these don't arise that often!
A Mammoth experience
CGEye Ltd is a visualisation studio that specialises in computer generated images (CGI) for architects. Rise AR on the other hand, develops augmented & virtual reality apps and experiences for businesses in order to enhance customer appeal. It was through Rise AR that we managed to develop an innovative interactive experience at Colchester Zoo involving Augmented Reality (AR) technology. AR, for anyone who is unsure, allows you to view the world through a mobile device or projector in a whole new way, by overlaying digital content onto a live camera view to magically place objects in the real world right in front of your eyes. This experience allows visitors to interact with two animated woolly mammoths, as if in the room with them. In order to publicise the experience before a press release (coming later this month), it was crucial that we filmed a promotional video!
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| The experience - interactive augmented reality at Colchester Zoo |
No 4G for me
The first problem for me arose around not long after I walked through the zoo gates: I had no internet. At least I had a few minutes of peaceful smugness thinking that my day was going to be much easier than what it was panning out to be. Considering I only had two jobs to do over the course of the filming, I was stumped with the first task 5 minutes after arriving - great. I soon managed to bag the WiFi code, however that seemed to work for a grand total of 2 minutes. Statistics for the days social media posts: Tweets: 1, Live Streams: 0.
My new job for the day was to document the filming process by taking numerous photos throughout the morning. I've included a small number of these at the bottom of this post!
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| The only Tweet that I managed to conjure in my 2 minute window of freedom |
The filming process
The actual filming aspect of the day was enjoyable. I was featuring in the video more than I originally expected, so felt a little nervy considering my acting skills are next to none. However, I didn't expect the whole process would be as lengthy as it was; I'm quite naive when it comes to things like this as you've probably gathered! We were there in total for two and a half hours, which really is not long when you're trying to make a masterpiece, especially when you are repeating each scene 4/5 times.
Take 1
The first take showed a few people walking into the Zoo's elephant house (where the experience is based) and joining a queue. I was selected as one of three to be in said walking group. I was glad to be picked as I like being involved and am happy to muck in when I'm needed but as I've said before, the whole process of filming each scene was much longer than expected. There are so many factors to consider when filming: weather conditions, difference in light from outdoors and indoors, walking speed, height between actors in relation to surroundings, position of the camera... the list goes on! Ed from Starr Photography did an excellent job at keeping the consistency between all of these factors (and more!) to guarantee the best possible outcome. This consistency in return, however, meant walking into a queue, "acting natural" and chatting the same convo with the other queue joiners, had to be repeated again, and again, and again. It was tiring to say the least!
Onwards and Upwards
Moving on and it was time to simulate the experience and film it all in action. The experience only lasts for about 90 seconds in order for individual families to enjoy the experience by themselves while queues are kept down. We took multiple shots from within the experience including walking shots in and out, and the main interaction with the woolly mammoths!
Taking it's toll...
To make our video as authentic as possible and considering it is an attraction most suited to families, it was inevitable that a few youngsters were involved too. This was all good to begin with, but with the endless number of takes and repetitions of overly exaggerated emotions from all of us, they ended up getting a little restless and tired. With the bribe of an ice-cream after the shoot, however, they powered through! They say never work with children and animals at the same time and somehow we ended up working with both!On site photography
Here are a few shots I took on my phone during the filming process...
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| Ed from Starr Photography directing us in order to simulate a queue |
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| Scenes from inside the experience |
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| Action! Ed from Starr Photography in charge of filming and directing |
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| Working with the experience - audience members interacting with the mammoths |
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| Ed from Starr Photography filming the audience interacting with mammoths |
Success!
Despite the initial downfall of a failing connection and the slight meltdown from some of the kids half was through the shoot, I think we can say that overall the filming was a success! We've got some excellent shots that really complement all our hard work and we're now excited to see the final product!Thanks again to all that participated and took part, especially to Starr Photography for their fantastic filming and Colchester Zoo for all your patience!
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