SGO, the team behind Mistika VR, has published a feature on our Chornobyl VR project for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development – a close look at how the film was stitched together under conditions that left no room for a second attempt.

The 7-minute 360 documentary was commissioned to mark 40 years since the Chornobyl disaster, and to put donors and decision-makers inside a place almost none of them will ever stand: the control room of Reactor 3, the interior of the damaged New Safe Confinement, and the abandoned streets of Pripyat. We shot the bulk of it on the Meta Three at 12.5K, with aerials on Insta360 X5s, across an exclusion zone that is now an entirely military area.

The thread running through SGO’s piece is one we felt every day on location: there would be no second trip. Crossing the Polish-Ukrainian border in armoured B7 vehicles, sleeping in hotel basements through nightly air-raid alerts, working under radiation protocols with a guide empowered to confiscate any piece of kit reading above the limit – whatever we left behind, we left permanently. That changed what our post pipeline needed to be.

We put Mistika VR right at the front of the chain. As we told SGO:

“Mistika VR sat right at the front of the post for everything we shot on the Meta Three, which was the bulk of the project. Keeping it at the front meant the edit team was always cutting against properly stitched plates rather than wrestling with proxies that would change underneath them later – which is what saves you on a project that tight.”

The feature digs into the moments where that mattered most. The Reactor 3 control sequence, where the viewer ends up standing where the shift supervisor stood on the night of 26 April 1986, with the AZ-5 emergency-shutdown button close in their field of view – the stitch there had to be invisible, and optical flow handled the seam across the console cleanly. The Soviet-era lighting in the interiors, a mix of greenish fluorescents and tungsten that each lens read slightly differently, where colour matching gave us a clean, predictable base before the footage ever reached a colourist. And the broader point that on a shoot like this, the value of your post tools is measured in confidence on the day, not features on a spec sheet.

You can read the full feature on the SGO website, and watch the film here.

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Chornobyl VR was produced by Visualise for the EBRD to mark the 40th anniversary of the disaster. Shot on the Meta Three (12.5K) with aerial 360 on Insta360 X5s, and stitched in SGO Mistika VR. To find out more about the EBRD’s Chornobyl programme and its call for €500m+ in repair funding, visit ebrd.com.