deep cut: travis linville 360° music video

Our friend Travis Linville just released a new record!

For his latest single, “Blue Sky Bound,” we captured Travis and his band in the blue-est, sky-est way we could think of—a full 360° video in a few scenic, outdoor Tulsa locations. To set it apart from his other performance-based videos for the album (made by the stellar Atria Creative), our videographer and editor Morganne dropped in a few comical Easter eggs to encourage viewers to look around. I mean really, you should look around.

Here’s some details from Morganne on how it all went down:

Travis and I location scouted before the shoot to test different angles, camera heights, and distances. When it comes to 360°, the sky—*wink*—is literally the limit, so it was important for us to have that solidified from the get-go.

We nailed down the angle we thought would be most interesting for viewers and went from there, capturing a few different takes at each location: one normal, “vanilla” take; one safety take; and one “this-is-a-music-video-for-crying-out-loud-do-something-eye-catching” take.

The most difficult part of the shoot was finding exact lookalikes for band members in the scenes that required doubles. If you look closely, I’m sure you’ll find a few differences though.

The thing to remember with 360° footage capture is that the camera basically becomes the all-seeing Eye of Sauron, sans the fire. Once you hit record, you can’t hide anything from the camera except by way of obscuration via foreground objects. You have to rethink both how you’ll arrange your subjects and, just as importantly, where you’ll arrange yourself so the…Eye of Sauron…doesn’t see you.

Videography is an art, but 360° videography is more comparable to an extreme sport. You know, the extreme sport where you press a button and sprint behind the nearest and largest object in sight and sit there for three or four minutes. If that sport didn’t exist before the production of this video, it does now. I hid behind concrete highway support beams, sprinted up arena stairs, stood behind small building signs and light poles, etc. Needless to say if hide-and-go-seek were an extreme sport, I would be approaching pro-level status.

Having 360° of footage also means you can do wacky things for platforms that don’t support the immersive experience. We called these social media trailers “Choose Your Fighter” and “Tiny Planet,” respectively:

Fire up your YouTube app, find a spinning chair, and check out the full video on Travis’s YouTube channel:

Oklahomans: you might recognize the blue basketball courts from the Gathering Place or the downtown Tulsa skyline, but let us know if you figure out where else these guys went to play!