Hive Smart Home
We were recently brought in by London-based digital agency Waste Creative to create an immersive 360º video experience for their client, Hive. The aim of the campaign was to demystify the ‘connected home’ technology and help people understand what a smart home is and how it can benefit them. To achieve this, we created an interactive web experience that shows Hive products being used in everyday life.
We are unable to embed the experience on our site, but you can access it here.
From a technical point of view, this project was more complex than it initially looks. The video was shot on a custom, high-end, static 360º video camera rig, consisting of back-to-back Panasonic GH5S cameras and Japanese Entaniya lenses. The entire scene was lit artificially so that we could fully control the scene and maintain constant light levels throughout the 10-hour shoot day.
All the exteriors through the windows were shot with green screens and then the original, real exteriors were replaced in post-production. We blacked out the window panel above the central part of the kitchen and replaced it with fully controllable daylight LED blankets. The same was done for the exterior – a large tent was constructed over the garden which was then draped in green screen and lit from above with LED blankets.
Post-production of the footage required the green screen removal and careful roto where needed of the characters in the scene. Finally, we used optical flow to seamlessly stitch the scene, even with people moving close to the camera rig.
