A simulated 360° Google tour for Shortwork's showcase video
Not only is Justin of Shortwork a fabulous photographer, he also creates incredible 360° Google tours for businesses to show off what they have to offer. For his new website wanted a video to showcase these tours.
The Problem
Capturing the tours through Google itself for a video created challenges such as load speed through areas, quality affected by connection and the user interface clutter. This didn’t make for a clean, fast-paced video to catch eyes and showcase several different locations within one minute.
The Solution
Justin creates these virtual tours by capturing several photos per point and stitching them together to create a panorama like below (you can find out more on his website).
These panoramas are then stitched together to create the full tour. What this meant is we could use the panoramas within Adobe AfterEffects to replicate a virtual tour. We stuck to specific snippets for each location and provided a range of views, with camera movement like you are dragging the Google 360° view around.
I replicated the menu overlays too with motion graphics, showing the viewer how users can jump to different areas in a couple of clicks.
To aid with a cleaner look we opted not to include some of the user interface elements you’d find on Google, such as the arrows, zoom, share and information icons.
A selection of photographs were also run through at the end of the video in order to showcase his other offering within the same video.
This very enjoyable project resulted in Justin being provided with various versions of the video, with and without music. He was given videos with the virtual tour and photography separately too.
Shortwork Photography has worked with Liv over the last year and her work is always top quality. Crucially she follows the brief, keeping amendments to a minimum, which is unusual. Communication is excellent, delivering on time and on budget. We will be using Liv again. Highly recommended. - Justin Short, Shortwork