Monday 10 July

NOON:

This is cool. I’ve just come from a meeting with digital agency, RAPP, where I was told about a project which would be right up our street – it’s to create a 360-degree experience of an event which is being held for the launch of Destiny 2 Beta. Virgin Media is creating an underground world where hardcore fans of the game will be invited in to take part in the launch and most importantly – from their point of view – get their hands on playing the game itself. The only problem is that the event is happening on Sunday, and this is already Monday afternoon. That does not give us much time…. But I reckon if we can get some early access Holoscribe would be a brilliant tool to put this project together. We’re not quite finished on building the tool yet, but even with what we’ve got we could put together something pretty cool. Time to tell the team.

6PM:

I emailed RAPP this afternoon to ask about early access to the venue. My thinking was that if we could go in on Wednesday or Thursday we could plan a route around the experience, get some dummy shots, and work out what needed to go where. No such luck! The whole thing is only being built at the weekend, ready to admit the gamers on Monday morning. The soonest we can get in is Sunday evening, 7pm, and the whole project needs to go live at 11am the next morning. For now, we’ll have to work off the floor plan:

Plan of Virgin Media’s underground world – at this stage, all we had to go on

Tuesday 11 July

I’ve been having a chat with Marcus (co-founder and CTO) – he’s rightly got me thinking about what we can achieve given the very short time. I think we’re going to be OK, but we need to focus on what can physically and technically be done. Of course the client will want the most ambitious and creative treatment, as would we, but we need to keep at the front of our mind what is practical. And not just that, but what is the highest quality experience we can deliver. We know we can turn content around quickly – I’ve thrown plenty of 360 content at my team before and they’ve built things from it, but we’ve yet to do a project with this complexity or pressure before.

I don’t know about the rest of the team, but I quite like the challenge – this is what we’re here to prove, right? That we’re building a tool where you can create these experiences in minutes? It would have been easy to say to the client that we could take some pictures and come back in a couple of weeks after we’d processed and built them. But that’s not what we’re about – that would make us the same as any other agency. Having to do it quickly will validate what we are offering, and will highlight that there is a need for what we’re doing – that people want to build these experiences and turn them around quickly. Actually even though there are now lots of people working in 360, AR and VR, I’m not sure there is anyone else around at the moment who could do what we are planning here. This could be our make or break.

We still don’t know if the project is going ahead, but we’ve been thinking about how we’ll build a route through the scenes, how we’ll show the hotspots and what extra interactive content there might be. In a way the project might feel as if it’s being pulled in two directions – on the one hand the creative vision will want to be as full-on as possible, and on the other we know that shooting too high and failing to deliver anything is not an option. The content really will be king – the technical implementation of the project makes a difference of course, but it’s the content which really brings meaning for the user. I am conscious though that every hour we don’t get started, the more that risk’s going out of balance.

Thursday 13 July

NOON:

On Monday I said we needed a decision about whether we’re going ahead with the project before close of business on Tuesday. By the middle of Wednesday, the creative ideas hadn’t been pitched to the client. So at about mid-morning, I sent an email asking if there was any news. After about 10 minutes I got a reply saying: “We’re on.” I’m not sure if it was the adrenaline from excitement or relief, but the news gave me goosebumps.

Straightaway I wrote to the team – CTO Marcus, with our designer, developers and the rest of the team based in different parts of the globe- to say the project was on, and that at this time in four days it would all have been completed and delivered. We’re talking all the time on Slack anyway, but we got on a call to plan what each part of the operation needed to do. Though we’d never planned our team to be in three different parts of the world, actually for this project it is going to be a real advantage – we can work around the clock. I let them all know on the call that I’d allowed budget for Red Bull and pizza for us to pull off a weekend shift. We all know this is going to be a lot of work but as it will be our first project to go live, everyone seems keen to do what’s required.

3PM:

We’ve been asked if we could provide the 360 degree photography as well. Though we’ve worked a lot with 360 stills and video, we haven’t actually yet produced our own images to work with – not, at least, for a client on a live project. My response was: “…..[slight pause….] Yes. I’m sure we can find a way.” To be honest it hadn’t really occurred to me that there wouldn’t be a team which was ready in place to take the 360 images. Doing this well is not an insignificant task – particularly as we’ll only get one chance to capture what we need – and it’s not the sort of thing you can just point an iPhone at. So I started speaking to all my contacts, going through freelance photographers, video producers, agencies – following up suggestions that people gave us, and checking every website offering the service. But what we’re asking was a very specific thing in a very short timeframe. Basically I was asking them on a Thursday afternoon if they could do a live shoot on Sunday evening and deliver the content to us that night, leaving very little time, if any, for post-production. Most were not available, and many could not deliver what we wanted in the time available anyway. But luckily we’ve previously worked on a couple of projects with Harpoon Productions, a young digital content agency, and got them on board. They had the appetite for a challenge and within a couple of hours had got all the kit they needed arranged, and were ready to gear up for filming on Sunday night.