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Plot, Character, and Dialogue

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VR and 360 Video Production

4.7 (226 ratings) | 8.3K Students Enrolled

Welcome to the Google AR & VR Virtual Reality and 360 video production course! Our mission is to give you the skills you need to get started with your first VR project. This course will introduce you to Virtual Reality and 360 video production, guiding you through a step-by-step process to create VR content. To begin, we recommend taking a few minutes to explore the course site and review the material. Best of luck as you get started - we hope you enjoy the course, and can't wait to see what you'll create!

Skills You'll Learn

Virtual Reality, Camera+, Video Production, 360-degree video

Reviews

4.7 (226 ratings)

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SM

May 24, 2018

This course was very informative! I would highly recommend this course to someone who is interested in making their own 360 videos.

NC

Apr 26, 2019

Great overview of 360 production for beginners. Thoroughly enjoyed the course, which was well presented short videos and readings.

From the lesson

Perfecting the VR Preproduction Pipeline

In this module, you'll learn the creative and technical nuances of 360 video production and how they impact preproduction. These lessons will provide the tools and processes necessary to write, plan, staff, and cast your VR production.

Questions to Ask Yourself1:27

Achieving Presence1:30

Space and Setting1:36

Plot, Character, and Dialogue2:16

Taught By

Google AR & VR

Transcript

If you're working on a narrative experience, the plot is obviously a very important part. By plot, we mean the actions and events of the story that we actually see. Contemporary popular storytelling is most often plot driven, a classic model going back millennia. In this model, the story moves forward based on the linear cause and effect relationship of these actions and events. Our appreciation of the story is often based on our understanding of these relationships. This model is challenged in 360, because we as the storytellers, cannot be certain that the audience will see any of these actions or events. We cannot manipulate their attention in the same way we can in other visual mediums, where we rely on composition and editing. In 360, you will have significantly fewer set ups and cuts, so you will have fewer opportunities to direct audience attention in very specific places. As we mentioned in the last section, it helps to think spatially. What can you teach audiences about the story using just the environment and the objects in it? Imagine the ways you can use space to build more of the plot. Character and dialogue are aspects of narrative we've understood since we could understand stories. But how we use them in 360 is somewhat different than in film or TV. The audience here is more interested in what it feels like to be this person in this environment, because the medium is more about space and embodiment than just A to B plot. We're much more interested in being present with the characters and feeling what they feel. It's a subtle but important difference in thinking about how you will reveal who they are to audiences. Another key difference in composing your experience, is remembering that dialogue is not something to rely heavily on in 360. It's not a medium that's conducive to long conversations. This has to do with the amount of sensory information audiences are taking in. It's hard to focus on any one thing for a long period of time when there are distractions all over the place. It helps to write dialogue that has subtexts or the meaning behind our words that we might not be saying. By writing dialogue that has subtext, you invite viewers to participate with the story by trying to figure out why a character is saying what they're saying. If you do want someone to focus on something in particular, there are ways to steer viewer attention and perhaps eliminate distractions. We'll tell you more about that in the next module.

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