SASKATOON EXPRESS - October 5-11, 2015 5, - Page Volume 12, Issue 40, Week of October 20151
Saskatoonʼs REAL Community Newspaper
Saskatonian wins Emmy for Swift video
Cam Hutchinson Saskatoon Express yan Whitehead was holding a video camera above his head as he followed Pope Francis at Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro. As Whitehead moved through the crowd, he was jostled. At first he thought little of it. After all, there were more than three million people on the beach for World Youth Day in July 2013. He was bumped again and then a third time. He had been pickpocketed. Smile, pickpockets, you are on a notso-candid camera. Whitehead was carrying a 360-degree video camera. He was capturing the magnitude of the Pope’s visit in all directions using a relatively new piece of technology. Watching the video with a special headset puts viewers in that crowd with Whitehead, the Pope and the pickpockets. The camera provides a virtual reality experience, which is as real as it gets for now. “I was doing a tracking shot and I was running, kind of following him, and there were lots of people and the Swiss Guard around him,” Whitehead said. When Whitehead reviewed the video, he saw the thieves surround him, bump him three times and pop a touch screen monitor interface out of his pocket. The piece allowed Whitehead to start and stop recording. “Luckily the recording kept going. I knew I had gotten pickpocketed. When we analyzed the footage, you can see these guys doing this. It’s like, ‘Yup, that’s where they took that off me.’ They ran away, not realizing it’s a 360 camera, but they had never seen one before. They thought they were doing a standard (pickpocketing),” he said with a laugh. Welcome to Whitehead’s world. Being pickpocketed is abnormal for him, but shooting famous people, events and commercials around the world isn’t. It’s unlikely Taylor Swift or Conan O’Brien or Dale Earnhardt Jr. or Tony Bennett have had their hands in Whitehead’s pockets. He has worked with all of them. He recently won an Emmy for his work with Swift. Whitehead was born and raised in Saskatoon. After completing high school at Bishop James Mahoney, he went to Arizona for post-secondary school. At the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Science in Tempe, he earned a degree in sound engineering. From there, he moved to Vancouver. “That is where the work was if I wanted to get into film and television. That’s where I needed to be,” Whitehead said. He partnered with a friend and started “a little production company that slowly turned into a 360 photography company. That snowballed into 360-degree video.” A project at a resort at the top of Vancouver Island gave him his break. The resort is accessible by helicopter. The plan was to fly over and shoot panoramic photography. The terrain was beautiful, what with the water and trees and glaciers. Then, another idea hit Whitehead and his friend. Why not take their 360 cam-
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Virtual Reality Ryan Whitehead has travelled the world shooting 360 video (Photo Supplied) era and put the setting on video? Could they get 360-degree video? “It was a bit experimental and . . . it actually worked, to our amazement. We got some amazing footage. We put some music behind it and that was the difference. We took that technology and created a very cheap and simple solution to get into it and then capture it. Then we scored it, put a music track behind it, to give it a little more feeling and bring it to life. Up until that point, there really wasn’t anybody doing narrative pieces or really treating it as a new film technique or application. “We sat back and it kind of hit us that we have something here: ‘This is pretty cool.’ That video went organically viral at that time. There was no marketing behind it, no anything.” That was in 2010. The piece, shot with that cobbled
together camera, was noticed by a big player in the business — a company named Immersive Media. “They saw that video and kind of snapped me up, bought the company and that brought me into Immersive Media.” Immersive Media is big. So big it created the Google Street View project. A guy from Saskatoon was suddenly a leader on the leading edge of new technology. Whitehead, who is based in Kelowna, now runs the entertainment division of Digital Domain. There is a joint venture link between Digital Domain, which was founded by James Cameron — yes, that James Cameron — and Immersive Media. Whitehead says there is a big push for virtual reality right now. The content being produced is fuelling the demand for devices such as the Samsung Gear VR.
Soon the Oculus Rift, a company recently purchased by Facebook for $2 billion, will join in. The Sony PlayStation will become VR next year. Gamers will wear headsets as they play, giving them the feeling of being part of the action. “There are a lot of big players getting into the space. There are going to be a lot of headsets in the next year and a half, two years. I would expect to see people with head-mounted displays stuck on their heads in all sorts of places — at the coffee shop, on the plane, on the bus, at home.” Whitehead shot the award-winning Swift video in New York last year. He said it was an interesting experience. There were no Swiss Guards, but security was tight. “You go on set and kind of sign your life away. (Continued on page 6)