National Geographic

Shooting 360 content, video and photography at some of the nations greatest national parks.

National Geographic & Hyundai teamed up to create an immersive and educational website exploring some of the nation's great national parks, called Outside Academy. Working alongside the awesome agency House of V, we were tasked with producing a mixture of 360 videos, b-roll, and photographs to fill the content on the site.

Pre-Production

Needing to parse down the 423 national parks in the USA to three parks was no easy task—between seasonal challenges, terrain variations, and even National parks' willingness to allow us to shoot. We finally landed the three parks we would shoot: Zion National Park in Utah, Yosemite National Park in California, and Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee. Having just a few shoot days per park meant we needed a solid shoot schedule with locked-in locations that looked great and could accommodate a car being in the shot. We location scouted each park, hitting roughly a dozen locations per day and shooting out the areas as best we could with 360 videos and photographs to show the clients and get approval.

Production

Locations were largely chosen based on how spectacular they looked in 360 with multiple points of interest in the landscape and, in some cases, the option to park a vehicle in the shot. During the scout, we used a sun tracking app to gauge the best time of day for each location when setting the shooting schedule. This of course meant we were getting up every day well before dawn so we could be on site to shoot at sunrise and then bouncing from location to location until well after sunset in some instances. The long days were grueling but worth it to capture some fantastic vistas.

In addition to all the 360 videos and photography of beautiful landscapes, we needed to get shots of a few new Hyundai cars that hadn’t weren’t released yet. We shot the 360 videos first since they are the site’s hero and highest priority content. Next, we snagged some detailed shots, including wides and extreme close-ups, paying close attention to the lines and details on each vehicle and highlighting these areas as best we could.

We couldn’t just shoot parked cars in national parks with beautiful scenery on the roads. However, we needed a plan to capture crisp, stable video while driving and still have the flexibility to shoot photographs simultaneously. Utilizing a Movi as the primary stabilizer rig, we worked closely with a key grip to build a rig that easily allowed us to add and remove the Movi to the front and back of our lead vehicle. With the rig in place, we could control the Movi using a Mimic from inside the vehicle with an attached monitor for the DP and client to view each shot as we drove. This budget-friendly rig allowed us to shoot photographs in the vehicle simultaneously to keep us on schedule and capture far more content than we could have otherwise.

Post-Production

The incredible and challenging thing about shooting in 360 is the view captures everything in all directions, including the tripod used to hold the camera. We couldn’t just leave the tripod and its shadows visible in the final stitched 360 shot, so we worked with a Flame artist to composite the tripod out of 360 videos. We then used Photoshop to remove the tripod and any other distractions from the stills, including an entire line of construction cones from one shot (good luck figuring out which one). This was a relatively new challenge, but we found solutions that most people wouldn’t even think twice about when viewing the final results.

Though not everything could make it onto the final site, by the end of the project, we shot over two dozen 360 videos, 9TB of RAW footage, ~3,500+ photos, and we may or may not have photoshopped a Sasquatch into the background of one of the 360 shots. We’ll never tell, but let us know if you find one while exploring. Outside Academy.