Norfolk is a weirdly long way from the West Midlands.

Even on a fairly quiet afternoon it still took over 3 hours to get from Coventry to Weybourne. This is interesting to me as it highlights that unevenness of infrastructure investment in the UK.

Norfolk is flat.

Again, nothing new here but the flatness had an impact when filming in 360, there was one location where I walked away from the camera for about a minute and still couldn’t get out of the shot easily.

360 film-making is awkward

The images produced by the Theta V are generally great even in the forest with a wide range of tones the camera coped and produced interesting images with highlights and shadows that contain detail. For me I don’t like the workflow, connecting to a smartphone is unreliable and when trying to use it ‘headless’ the LED lights on the device are hard to see in bright light (I ended up with a lot of shots of me staring gormlessly at the camera.

360 film-making needs a new approach

It was really hard to conceptualise the framing of a shot that doesn’t have a frame. Like a number of the projects this year I found myself having to try to forget the approaches that have worked for me in the past, the concept of a subject is fundamentally different when you can’t direct a viewers eye. I found it useful to try and think of it as 2 cameras filming with very wide lenses. Did each of the cameras include something of visual interest that would still be interesting given the extreme wide angle.