For the Juvenile Detention project, I worked alongside developers and a documentary producer at The Atlantic and created their first virtual reality films with composited animation. The opportunity allowed me to travel into the field at a juvenile detention center, film with cutting-edge and untested equipment, and animate/composite 3D animation onto VR footage.

The final project premiered at an Atlantic LIVE event in Washington DC, with US State Senators and juvenile justice experts in attendance. It was also published on a unique landing page on The Atlantic’s website. View the project here.

A lot of the challenge around this project involved paving new ground. Nobody around me had ever done anything like this before, so I had to learn and innovate as it developed.

The project involved side-by-side equirectangular footage stitched from two separate videos, as seen below. To composite animated characters into these environments, I recreated them and the VR camera in Blender and used multiple render passes to composite everything.

03.22.2018