The Challenge

Iconic sports brand Oakley have always been at the forefront of innovation with their high performance eyewear and goggles. To educate and show the benefits of the PRIZM™ range of lenses, Oakley approached Visualise to produce an app and 3x 360 action sports videos. The videos are to be experienced on the Samsung Gear VR headsets at sports trade shows and Luxottica buying days around the world.

The Solution

To show the performance, quality and different applications of the lenses, we shot some of the world’s top athletes from snow, road and trail as they put the goggles through their paces on the slopes of Colorado and roads of Italy.

In order to provide the individual perspective of the athletes we built our own unique rigs, each one different for the conditions of snow, road and trail. The snow rig was helmet mounted, crucially this had to show the goggles and the skier’s body. The road bike had a number of different custom mounts, some coming from the frame of the bike and others coming off body mounts and over the shoulder or to the side of the rider.

One of the main issues for the head-mount was comfort for the viewer – the skier had to be very smooth and we carefully selected the runs in order to achieve this. The cold temperatures also caused huge issues for the cameras – special warming bags were made for the cameras and removed at the last second for the cameras to roll.

For road and trail the weather was against us, so our waterproof camera setups were vital. Safety of the athletes is always paramount in these shoots – the different camera mounts had to both give dynamic angles and still allow the athletes to perform at their peak.

In order to translate the action sports content into a comfortable viewing experience, the Visualise post-production team developed a bespoke stabilisation method using the NUKE toolkit.

To show what the view looks like from the glasses, we used the actual PRIZM™ lenses as a reference to base the lens effect. Graphics are motion tracked to athletes in the view, which is particularly challenging in the fast moving snowboarding and skiing scenes.

The Results