Filming VR in a War Zone: Inside the Chernobyl Reactor

[Music] Hello everybody, this is Anna and Brian from a wonderful podcast and today we have our next guest for XOR episode and we're Stuart who is a founder of Visualize and Medic Camera. Hi Henry, how are you? Good, how are you guys? Amazing, thanks for joining us today, glad you can finally get on our podcast and maybe you can give a quick introduction to yourself in your background. So our listeners know your story and where you come from. Okay, yeah, so I am like an immersive purist I suppose, like my entire career has been spent in the world of immersive. So since 2006 I set up my company then straight out of university and I started shooting a 360 degree photography and that's when I set up Visualize. Visualize is my main company, it's immersive content production. So we do 360 videos and VR films, we do AR content production and everything under that umbrella of immersive content. And then I've got another company I set up in 2019 called Metacamera and we make 360 video cameras. Yeah, so this is my world like immersive content. I'm in a serious niche here and I think, you know, since 2006 I think we've done something like 400 different immersive content projects. So yeah, I know my onions as they say. So I think I know you've been since the right from the beginning, but I'm also curious like what was your maybe your first exposure to XR and you know, like you said, right, I've you decided to what drove you to start this straight after you need like, you know, what was the story that led to that. So a simple way it all started like I love photography. I was really into photography. I did a completely random degree in biology, which I had no interest in by the end of it and then took up my passion and was looking for ways of, you know, getting into photography as a business. 2006 I was looking on the internet and I saw these things called QuickTime VRs, I think they were called and they were just these very basic little kind of QuickTime Windows on a website and you could click and drag and look around the photo. And at the time it was just mind blowing this idea that you can have a photo that you can actually look around or kind of, you know, direct your own action or choose where to see. And so I looked into how to do it, got into that and so that was how the business started. It started with these 360 videos and virtual tours. And so we would do that for like schools and hotels and I'd run around the country doing those shots. And then and then I started getting into these much higher resolution panoramas where you could get these little kind of mini robots that you attached to your camera with a long lens and you'd set it off and it would take hundreds of photos which you'd stick together into these giant panoramas and these were called gigapixels. And so I started shooting gigapixels and I shot, I talked to St. Paul's Cathedral and I said, you know, would you guys let me in I'll do this giant picture and you guys can use it afterwards. And so I shot this picture in St. Paul's and it took about, it took about three hours to shoot and as it was shooting and coming down past the dome and all the way down and by the time it got down to ground level shooting the next row. They'd opened the doors to the cathedral and so people were pouring in and so a lot of the shots that it got was like kind of someone's head and then as the row went round. It would shoot the thin air and so you had these kind of floating heads and stuff in the middle of this picture. And as a result for all the wrong reasons it got picked up by the BBC and it was the at the time the world's largest indoor photo ever but also had these amazing kind of floating heads and body parts and so it went viral. And off the back of that then the BBC said, well, why don't you come back and shoot something kind of that we specify and we and I shot the Royal Wedding in 2011 as this giant panorama like but without floating heads luckily really beautifully put together. And it was absolutely massive this shot and it sat on the homepage of the BBC website for a good few weeks and that was really where I made my name as the kind of immersive photographer and off the back of that get the images pick me up and I shot the Olympics in 2012 and that was really for for me and the business the kind of start of all the fun because around that time as well 2012. This brilliant character called Jürgen Geards who was based over in New York had started to 3d print these kind of rigs made up of this assemble go pros and these were 360 video rigs so I got one of those off Jürgen and I was shooting with that. And producing lots of 360 video which we were using in things like iPad apps you know so you'd move the iPad around with the gyro and we used to call it magic window like you were looking into a magic window into another world and that was great you know everyone loved it but it's quite small scale but unbeknownst to us the same time in his parents garage palm of luck he was there with a soldering iron making his first Oculus VR headsets. And then the development kits were announced and we got one of these and realized that these all these videos and all these photos that we've been making for years could be viewed immersive like you could you could view them like you were there and it became overnight this new medium and then we started to go and see we had a couple of these in these kind of lunch boxes and you've gone visit all the agencies around Soho and London these digital agencies and advertising agencies who just absolutely loved it. And so that was kind of where things got took off and VR was booming and we were producing 360 films you know for mostly advertising and marketing back then. Yeah so that was how it all started for me. It's kind of like the whole story just like starting from like biology and just like Royal wedding Olympics. Every time it's like it's really fun journey and you know the beauty of creating content in terms of filming is also it takes you to amazing places. And you know we've had some brilliant clients you know we've worked with people like Google the FT the economist we've worked with charities we've we've automotive clients but like all over the cut the world and so you know it's just been so much fun to get taken around to these fascinating places and you know that's what we were doing doing it pretty well and then COVID hit. And I remember kind of over a period of a few weeks each one of our projects lined up especially all the VR films were all canceled one after the other. So as a studio we had to think about you know what we could do in that period and that quiet period to kind of get by. And so we we started diversifying into a lot more AR at that point and doing you know augmented pieces and also through Metacamber when we started building these these lovely video cameras we started looking a lot more at the kind of live streaming side of things. And picked up an amazing project for with the Eden project as part of the government's 5G test bad series and we we live streamed 360 content from the Eden project down in Cornwall for over two years through Metacamber. Oh that's so cool it's actually like yeah it's one of the ways when you can get like super immersive and get to the places you will probably will never be able to go as like probably we can touch a little bit about the Chernobyl VR that you've done. It's a really interesting one like that I mean so the we've seen the business change quite drastically over the years you know from that kind of peak hype of VR probably like peak in 2016 when it was all about marketing brands advertising. It was all about kind of being the first to do this or that and then I think as there's been a bit of a reality check in terms of the commercial the consumer uptake of VR we see we we see most more of our projects now a kind of from a more practical point of view like there's something real that needs to be shown. It might be hard to access for example it might be dangerous you know that kind of thing so one of those projects is for one of our favorite clients they're called the EBRD the European Bank for reconstruction and development and this amazing company that that invests in these giant scale infrastructure projects around the world things like you know motorways and irrigation systems and power stations. And their kind of flagship project is what's called the new safety confinement home which goes over Chernobyl's reactor number four and basically after the disaster in 1986 the Soviets build. what was called the sarcophagus to cover the collapsed reactor and they made it out of very crude concrete and by the kind of early noughties, 2005 kind of time it was really in quite a bad dangerous state and so the EBRD amongst along with some other partners raised money to build this new safety confinement dome and it's an incredible piece of engineering it's this huge dome kind of arch the height of the statue of liberty which sits over the reactor number four and it's actually a very complex structure it's not just a dome it's also got these two layers to it membranes which allow it to be pressurized and therefore radioactive particles and things cut find it harder to get through so it's it's an active building and then in February last year it was hit by a Russian drone which blew a 15 meter hole in it and also caught fire along the inside of the insulation for it and so a significant part of the whole structure is totally broken and needs a huge amount of work to it and it's a lot of money to fix this but if you you know if they don't fix it it's essentially as good as not being there and so it's quite an urgent need and for for someone like the EBRD they need to convince stakeholders around Europe like very high profile individuals about the importance of this and and kind of really transport them and show them and there's no better medium for that than VR you know you can you can put the headset on and you can transport someone right into the heart of you know some of the most damaged areas of the power station you know we were up in the roof of the new safety confinement with experts showing us the damage we went down into the control rooms for the reactors number four and three to to tell the historical story as long as along with visiting Preppyat the kind of ghost town near Chernobyl um but yeah so that's the kind of thing which you know you can't really you just can't go there I mean there's no way you could have got there unless we had the support of someone like the EBRD and they can't send any of that the stakeholders out there to see it so we go out there we make these films and then you know they've got an amazing asset then to hopefully raise money to do something good and you know that getting out there itself was unbelievably hard so we had to fly into Lublin in the east of Poland and we got picked up in these amazing armoured vehicles called B7 armoured vehicles and we had a security detail that was the these guys from the front line who were on their R&R and just making a bit of extra cash and they drove us over the border and we drove up to the outskirts of the exclusion zone which is now all a military site so not only is it kind of dangerous and difficult to get into but actually it's also kind of heavily militarised and the hotel we were staying at was just all full of being billeted by the army as well and we had to find a hotel that had a bunker because it was very hard to get insurance to go out there and the only way we could get insurance is if they if we you know basically promised them that we would go into a bunker as soon as there was any alerts and the the problem we found was that the the missiles that were being fired from Belarus to Kiev went over Shinobu so every time they fired a missile or flew drones over to Kiev we had to go down into our basement and so we'd get working up you know you'd be up in your bed and then you get working up you come down and sleep in the basement and it kept happening you know so you're yo-yoing up and down and so by the last few nights we just all slept on the corridor at the floor of the basement just to get a good started night sleep and then on site in Shinobu is it's quite an incredible thing because 2000 people still work there and when you're filming VR films you've you've got you know some quite chunky cameras and kit to drag around and your audio stuff as well and we had a whole 16 by 9 crew with us and so you get there you check in you get your radiation tests and your levels you're given dosimeters to check if you're going to get a high dose of radiation and there's a guy who follows around with a Geiger counter who's constantly threatening to steal your kit and take it back with him if it's if it reads too high so I got paranoid and covered all my cameras with the cling film and the tripods with it as well and they had this complete mess of a kind of jellyfish I was carrying around the whole time but then you go in and you have to get changed and you get into these amazing kind of Soviet era overalls where you take everything off you just have to have white leggings on and a white first and then you get the next layer of white kind of cotton suit thing and then another layer and then you get this big black so a big blue Soviet thick woolen jacket and a helmet and off you go and you go off down the corridors in Shinobu and it's mile after mile of these incredible kind of rickety corridors with the walls all crumbling and the tiles all clacking and moving as the wheels go over them but eventually you'll you'll climb through all these corridors and you go up into the roof spaces your decimator will be beeping hard at your turn of corner and there'll be this incredible view of something like reactor hall number three which is just the most creepy thing to see it's a moment frozen in time you know the the phones on the walls have the kind of wheels that you dial around and there's really old radios still pumping out kind of what feels like old musical it's probably not it's just the feel of it all ash trays everywhere everyone still smokes inside there it's all these little differences but the place is just being kind of gradually managed down to to be safe but it's still you know a working plant and yeah very very odd place to film but fascinating as well and incredibly rewarding to go and visit you know I've always been fascinated by Shinobu and read all about it and never never really dreamed I'd get to go there especially not after 2022 and the war starting but you know it's it's going to be a really cool film it's going to be a really fun film but ultimately we keep having to remind ourselves you know this is for the EBRD this isn't me you know scratching my my history it's I've got to make this film do what it has to do for the EBRD and the the presenter of the film Jonathan Wales he's the head of video there at the EBRD and he's directing this and he's absolutely brilliant very charismatic and he leads the narrative on the whole thing so when it's finished we'll have this film that will go on a special VR app will build for the EBRD to allow them to easily demo this at their events and hopefully raise some money and then I'm going to try and beg the EBRD that we can make an alternative cut of it which we can enter into some of the dockfests and see if we can get it around the festival circuit because it's it's just a uniquely fascinating place the way that the locality around it has been taken back by nature the kind of the frozen moment in time thing when you go into the school there and the swimming pool and all these other places and you know it's it's kind of like a an awful museum on a scale that you would never be in in any other place so I feel like there's a lot of people that would be fascinated to see that so that's my my hope wow I mean that's that's a fantastic story and I'd love to hear more about it I'm also curious because you know the whole purpose of that maybe project was to film the actual site itself for the EBRD but how much of the you know you mentioned like the schools and everything else that sort of frozen in time how much of that did you manage the capture as well as part of the project yeah so um like it was really good that the creative the kind of idea behind the film wasn't just to show the damage it was to talk about the whole story that led up to it and setting the scene so we you know so there were lots of areas that were already in the storyboards that that you'd really want to see and then while we were there you know we were in Pripyat so we thought well let's go and see the Ferithworld or let's go and do this and you know there was no one else there because I think before 2022 it was quite a tourism site and lots of people would go to Pripyat especially I think the the power station was still pretty much off limits but so there would have been probably a lot more people around the place and we had it all to ourselves and so yeah we we did spend a decent amount of time capturing things but there was still a lot more you could capture um the end result they keep the kind of end timings of the of the film be around um 15 I think it's that I think the final piece is going to be around 10 minutes but we've we've shot enough footage to you know make a a slightly different experience that could be a bit longer as well um which which we might try and do one thing I forgot to mention as well is that we um we wanted to get some aerial shots and of course at the moment in Ukraine airspace for drones. is particularly difficult, but we've got quite unique permission to fly drones at the power plant and Pripyat. So, but of course it's very hard to coordinate between all of these different troops that are kind of up in the hills or up on top of buildings or whatever, so they could never guarantee us that the drones would be okay. And a couple of times we'd throw these drones up into the sky and when we did the drones by the way, we didn't put the big meta-cam… because the meta-camers are quite big, you know, they're very big sensors, big lenses. And so for the aerial stuff in Shinobu we thought it was too much for risk and so we just put these little kind of insta-fi-vexes up, which are, you know, amazing little things really, but we put them up with a DJI-Mavic kind of thing. And so we fluid up and we'd start getting our shot and all of a sudden we'd totally just lose connection to the drone and it would just be floating up there in the sky and you'd look around you and try and see if there was anyone that you could weigh that and eventually you just get we'd get control of it again, it'd be okay and we'd decide not to fly over there, let's try over here and we kind of do that until we could find places that we could seemingly control the drone enough, all good most of the time until the last day and we fluid out to try and get this last shot we wanted with these incredible kind of shipwrecks that were out in this lake near the power station and the drone just suddenly we lost control of it and then it flew off into the sky and it just then went off at a thousand miles an hour, never seen a drone so fast and so far we never saw it again. It'd just been completely hijacked in in some way so yeah that was the end of that one and luckily though we got most of the footage off it, there was only a tiny bit we lost so yeah. Oh wow yeah just like if you're filming and kind of because you've already mentioned that if you can't actually take back if there's certain like radiation like back home, especially the cameras that's the reason why you try to protect your camera kit as much as you can. Yeah you've got to be really careful you know if you drop things in certain places you're not meant to pick them up. Yeah it's pretty bad but it wasn't as bad as I feared which was good you know the we also had this guy with us with this amazing Geiger counter and you know he was constantly sweeping the area and checking and you occasionally find real highlights and tell us you know don't go near there but I think yeah I think we were okay and all of our kit checked out at the end we got it all back which I was terrified about the metacamera. I mean to tell my my business partner said that I had to leave it there would not have gone down well but I really like the idea that you actually it's helpful for them like to raise money to repair like the roof and everything but I was wondering if so for example in the future is there any particular problem in the world or like the place you really want to raise awareness about or like show what kind of like to connect it as well as like the Chernobyl your creative masterpiece to you oh there's action you can do and actually help it. What you mean for Chernobyl in particular or other locations in general? No no no like are there any other they're just like you kind of dream about doing? Well yeah I mean I have a possibility to I tell you one of the ones that I thought was incredible I mean I think you were we we loved doing charity projects and we did one this last summer for an amazing charity called the Worldwide Veterinary Society and they have this project this multi-national project called Mission Rabies and they go they go to these very impoverished areas in often central Africa we were in Malawi in summer and they vaccinate 75% of the dogs in each village they go to and they they carefully cut up the entire map into polygons and they sent they have all these teams of volunteer vets that come down and they all go out they round up all of the dogs they they you know they go around with a loud speaker on top of their cars and they round up all the villagers and they have these big drives they call them and people bring all their dogs along and they get all the street dogs and they vaccinate them because the number of deaths of children from rabies dogs bites in Malawi for example was crazy it was like multiple per day and so these guys have been eradicating this stuff and so we did a film with their kind of CEO this guy called Luke Gamble he's like a British Steve Irwin he's an amazing character and he led this film and narrate certain we got this amazing footage of from this little village in Malawi and then that now he's got a series of those headsets all over yeah all over their offices and then he takes them out to these big fundraisers they do and they get their money from corporate social responsibility budgets and so they go and do these fundraisers with these big corporates who've got these you know budgets to spend for good and by showing stuff in the VR headset alongside his talk he can literally transport them there and kind of get them to really empathize with the need for this and the impact that these guys are having because it's a it's a massive impact like it's a really great job they're doing but like there's so many videos out there there's so many like other forms of media or photographs so you just don't really take it in but if you put this headset on and you get you know you you really feel like you've been there it's quite an incredible thing and like so I think projects like that are the kind of thing that we're really enjoying at the moment another one we did this last year was for St John ambulance and we've done a piece for them which is a bit more interactive it's this kind of VR film about these two boys who fall out and then they get in a fight and one of them stabs the other one and along the way in this film you're encouraged to make to make decisions it starts off with kind of silly and simple ones like do you you know do you go for a chicken or for a burger and so on but then like once the stabbing happens you need to make decisions like you know what whether or not you stay on scene or if you phone the ambulance or if you take a video for proof or something all these different options and then you're you're helped in learning how to do a tourniquet and how to understand how to help someone who's basically dying from a knife wind in front of you and the using VR like this because the way this the way this program works it's called the I try to remember the name of it now young responders program and the way it works is that you they they go around to different schools all over London and all over the UK and they they set up these workshops and they get young kids in and initially they're not really focused or really listening very well and so they give them this VR experience that allows them to see this kind of very gritty and real experience or something horrible happening um sorry my dog's making a hell of noise I'm just going to kick her out he's usually quiet no no it's so cute that's one great you can you can bring the dog as well it's okay so just like get the shot with the dog yeah yeah I'm sorry I banished her now but um yeah so the these kids aren't really focusing necessarily right at the beginning of the experience but once you put them in the VR headset and they see this thing and they start interacting and they see the results of what they've of the choices they've made and the the kind of seriousness of the impact of this whole thing apparently it really helps to galvanise them and it really helps them to focus and it just gets the the entire thing off to a really good start um they what they're rolling it out across the UK they're just they've just invested in a whole bunch new headsets and they're going to be pushing these further so um and we're hoping to do more of a kind of series with them so I think for us like anything like that any any kind of more charity stuff that has really good impact um is yeah and if it involves travelling to cool countries then it will all the better nice and I think you know there's a lot to take in because you've said you know that you've clearly had a lot of experience with so many different types of projects using you know immersive media I'm just wondering if you have maybe you know for people who are kind of still very new to the space of trying to explore the space do you have any kind of what's your top advice to them like maybe a quick advice that they could I don't know how could they even start with something like this um yeah so if you want to start out in immersive content specifically in VR filmmaking I think it's really easy actually I think first of all the the kind of consumer cameras out there uh like they're kind of really small portable ones that are surprisingly good and you can make experiments in first films easily with these cameras that cost kind of less than £500 which which is quite amazing and things like the insta pro sorry not the insta 5x which is the really small one it you know it stitches really easily it kind of stitches itself and it stabilises really well so you could make creative first films um kind of without much expense and then And also the software you need to edit these things, you can just throw it in Premiere in terms of like, if it's already automatically stitched, you can take that stabilized footage, you can put it on a timeline in Premiere and edit it like any other video, as long as you kind of watch out for a few simple rules. But it's a surprisingly easy medium to work with. I think one of the key things as well is, when you're making a film for VR, you've always got to think about what's the reality of how many people are going to see this. And if it's going to be shown to just a few people in a VR headset, probably not many. So how can you make a version of it that works really nicely on YouTube as well? Because uploading what we call an "ecquirectangular" which is the full two by one projection of a 360 video is possible to YouTube. And then you can get an interactive 360 view that you can click and drag around. So it's important if you're making these films and thinking about getting into it that you understand that there's only so many headsets, but there's everyone, every man is dog on YouTube. So it's worth doing stuff for that. But also one of the things that people are really excited by at the moment is large kind of stages and screens. And with things like OuterNet, In Tottenham Court Road and Frameless and Lightroom, there are these huge volumes already. Those are the kind of premium end of the scale. You know, right through to pop-up places like you can get through igloo vision who do amazing pop-ups and installed spaces for immersive rooms. But it's a brilliant way of people seeing this content, especially for things like events where you can really draw a crowd and have a shared experience using the same footage. So yeah, I think if I was getting into it now, I would be getting a simple consumer camera and just starting to play with it in experiment. And because the tools are all within reach and it's not too expensive to get into, that would be my way of approaching it. - And do you have any kind of last words or like huge predictions? And as well, what's the best way for our listeners to connect to you if they want to find out more? - Well, we'll include all of the links to the description, but yeah, just like what's the channel? - Okay, yeah, so what I'd like to say is just looking forward to the future of immersive films. So I think the future of immersive in general is really gonna be about wearables. So I think, you know, if you look at the meta-ray bands or the meta-unocly collaboration and how the next iteration of those is gonna be with AR, at the moment it's using AI to see the world and feed back to you audibly and then there's gonna be a simple UI on the screen, but really what we're excited about in our industry is where you have the ones with AR in them that tracks to the world around you, right? And allows things to be contextually placed. So that is a huge step forward. That's basically what matters Orion prototypes have been doing. And I think that that's the point where you will start to get towards something much more ubiquitous from the XR industry. Because I think first of all, whilst obviously, you know, my whole career is in XR, I still think there's a lot of friction to holding a phone out to do an AR experience or putting a VR headset on and isolating yourself from the people around you. Whereas, you know, if people start wearing wearables more and they look good, they're subtle, and then they've got these powerful features like AR and stuff like that, then you see that's the stepping stone forward towards more things like VR films being accessible through later generations of those glasses. And that's where I think it's going. - Thank you so much. - Great. - And yeah, I'm glad you enjoyed us today. Yeah, hopefully you will hear more and see more projects in the future. Yeah, likewise, thanks for joining us. And so I'll listen to this. Thank you for listening up to this point. And have a great day. Bye. - Bye.