The Columbia public school district has a very exciting new program called, the Steam Bus. On the outside it looks like a regular school bus with a really cool paint job, but on the inside its a custom designed VR wonderland. StoryUp VR created a 360 video that incorporated a combination of text, graphics, to the images and GIF, composited with 360 footage.
There’s a more detailed explanation from the art director at Story UP.
Art Director Quanah Leija-Elias (StoryUP) explains how he made the headset animation.
The headset animation was created using stop motion with a 4K photography camera, adobe Photoshop and some good old-fashioned repetition. The headset was placed on a white table with a white backdrop (whiteboard). We played with the f-stop on our camera to blend the table and backdrop into a similar white, while still keeping as much detail of the headset as possible.
At this point a turntable would have been perfect, but we just eyeballed each photo as we rotated, with our hands, a center point around the middle of the table.
Next came the lasso and magic wand tool in Adobe Photoshop…and a lot of it! I hunkered down and cut out each angle of the headset that had been photographed. This was a total of eight photos looped to repeat seamlessly.
Placing them in sequential order on the Photoshop timeline, I exported a .mov file. This animation can now be added into Adobe After Effects to apply it to 360 stitched video. You input your 2-Dimensional animation over the stitched 360 footage, then, after applying Mettle’s Skybox Converter to the animation, it outputs an equirectangular version of your animation.
And Viola! Animation within the sphere…well, just about.