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The Other House, a new boutique commercial production house, produced 360 degree video content for a unique, interactive Web experience allowing a visitor to virtually explore the infamous Pendleton Building --the ominous setting of the new Dean Koontz novel, 77 Shadow Street ( www.77ShadowStreet.com).
The Website is a 360 degree immersive experience of the Pendleton apartment building and features a series of maps a viewer employs to explore 25 locations spread across multiple apartments of characters at the Pendleton, with more than 100 special effects and details produced by the Other House.
The website was created and built by InTheMo Interactive.
To achieve the size, scope and luxury described in the book, The Other House filmed inside 27 different interiors across seven locations in the greater Los Angeles area using a state-of-the-art 360o degree video camera. The camera, with its unique spherical design and 11 lenses, captures video simultaneously in all directions at once. When viewed in the proper web player online, the video format allows users to manually "look" in any direction with their mouse or touch pad during playback.
Each room uses visual effects allowing a viewer a glimpse of the kind of terrifying things one experiences at the Pendleton. Koontz was involved every step of the way in the development of the site--he scouted locations in Los Angeles that were used as inspiration for the different rooms, consulting with InTheMo Interactive and The Other House throughout the entire process.
The unique 360o camera outputs to a wildly distorted video format known as "equi-rectangular" footage. "The idea is reminiscent of the way a map of the globe can be peeled off a sphere and viewed within a flat rectangle format," said The Other House's Chris Roth. "This format provided a host of challenges when it came to implementing special effects in post production as many conventional motion tracking tools cannot properly interpret the distorted geometry of the 360o video format."
Through vigorous testing and research, The Other House developed a host of new tricks for working with the footage, including techniques which would allow various parts of a room to be "un-distorted" temporarily for digital manipulation, and then later "re-distorted" back to their original format.
In addition to the on-location room captures, The Other House spent a day on a green screen sound stage in downtown Los Angeles to film some additional nightmare creatures and apparitions featured in the story.The unsettling characters were later composited into various rooms throughout the 360o web experience.
Additionally, the viewer has the option of using other technologies to make the experience personalized. If the user logs in with Facebook, newspaper headlines to be found on a desk in the house will suddenly read much differently -- and more personally -- than if one is not logged in. If a user employs his webcam capabilities, the Pendleton may take a picture of the user during a terrifying moment and then offer the user the chance to have the picture in a public gallery of previous Pendleton visitors (or victims).
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Related Keywords:The Other House, interactive media, 360 degree video, Dean Koontz, 77 Shadow Street, InTheMo Interactive, Pendleton Building
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