Friday, March 16, 2012

BBC Multi Platform - 'The Burning Room'


A while ago we had the pleasure to co-create a test platform for BBC's Multi Platform department. The brief was to explore the possibilities in interactive media that can be accessed by BBC's millions of online viewers.

Ace camera assistant Mihali Moore and Coob's Donnelly brothers discuss the required technicals for the panoramas.

Working again with Producer Jon Aird as we have on many previous adult education interactive experiences run on the BBC website. This time we had a 'blank canvas' and together, creative control in creating something that would explore the possibilities for online experiences, and something that could be easily adapted to terestrial projects such as Dr Who or Eastenders for instance.

Teamed up with Coob as we have done again in similar projects, we got going on drafting a scenario for our story to take place. For this a horor / suspense genre was chosen, as we also wanted to test out VFX elements in this experience.

ALL flame effects were filmed live in a Chromakey set up on site, and in the end up to 100 layers per frame were made to enhance certain scenes. The mastery of our VFX guru William Chang brought this to reality, while Adam Cutts, our Set Designer and Props Master worked his magic in creating the various sets to the final 'burn-out' set.

Exploring the paroramics was a key action we wanted to incorporate, as well as video insertion and sound cues.

The biggest hurdle we came up against was the compression in the platform of Flash video, where the very large VFX files had to be compressed heavily to ensure the smooth running of the experience.

Well received, we are now exploring the options of taking this and translating it to other genres like drama.

So take a moment, turn out the lights, and Enjoy!


No comments:

Post a Comment