This Project 3 focuses on the creation of a 360 immersive video Beyond the Mountain, themed around women’s safety, human trafficking and survival struggle. Throughout the whole production process, I completed full pre-production work including project proposal writing, theme definition, character setting, story design, scene planning, floor plan and storyboard production. Combined with tutor Martin’s professional guidance on camera perspective, I have adjusted and optimized my creative logic, and gained profound cognition and practical experience in immersive video creation, with obvious improvements in professional thinking and production ability.
In the early stage of creation, I took the immersive experience of the audience as the core goal, trying to adopt a dual first-person perspective to present the story from the perspectives of the abducted woman and the villager neighbor respectively. I intended to let the audience personally perceive the fear of being trapped and the tension of pursuit, so as to intuitively convey the core emotions of helplessness, despair and survival determination. However, in the initial storyboard and camera layout design of Scene 1 and Scene 2, the single first-person perspective had obvious limitations. The pure first-person shooting made the narrative rhythm too narrow, unable to fully display the environmental atmosphere of the remote mountain village and the oppressive overall tone of the psychological thriller genre. Moreover, it failed to lay a sufficient emotional foundation for the subsequent perspective switching and forest chase plot, making the expression of character emotions and story progression insufficiently layered and three-dimensional.
Under Martin’s guidance, I adjusted the overall camera perspective strategy of the work. I adopted a dominant third-person perspective to drive the narrative and express emotions, and interspersed appropriate first-person shots for auxiliary presentation. This revision has greatly optimized the immersive effect and narrative logic of the video. The third-person perspective can fully show the overall scene layout, environmental atmosphere and the character’s state from an objective panoramic view, allowing the audience to comprehensively capture the lonely and oppressive environment of the remote village, and better understand the character’s predicament and emotional changes with the development of the plot. Meanwhile, the interspersed first-person shots retain the sense of substitution of immersive video, enabling the audience to instantly feel the heroine’s fear and helplessness in the trapped and escaping scenes. The combination of the two perspectives makes the emotional expression more delicate and the story progression more coherent, which perfectly fits the positioning of the psychological thriller and strengthens the audience’s emotional resonance with the theme of women’s survival struggle.
In addition to the perspective adjustment, I also found many problems in the pre-creation process. In the initial scene breakdown and camera arrangement, I blindly pursued rich lens changes, resulting in redundant shot settings. According to the lecture knowledge, excessive lens switching will weaken the immersive sense of 360 video. Therefore, I optimized the shot settings on the basis of retaining the core plot, reduced unnecessary lens switching, and ensured the smoothness of the audience’s viewing experience. At the same time, in the design of floor plan and storyboard, I further standardized the equirectangular format production of panoramic images, accurately marked the camera position, actor placement and scene interest points, laying a solid foundation for the subsequent formal shooting.
From the perspective of theme expression, this creation made me realize the unique value of immersive video in conveying social themes. Different from traditional videos, 360 immersive creation can break the audience’s spectator identity. Through the integration of multiple perspectives, the audience can truly "witness" the plight of disadvantaged women, rather than simply watching the story. The open ending of the work abandons the stereotyped happy ending, leaving room for the audience to think about women’s safety, personal freedom and the right to choose, which makes the emotional and thematic expression more profound. In the process of designing characters and plots, I also deeply understood that the core of immersive works is empathy. Only by combining reasonable perspective switching, atmospheric scene creation and delicate emotional presentation can we effectively convey the core ideas of the work.
In terms of deficiencies, my current creation still has room for improvement. The switching rhythm of first-person and third-person perspectives is not precise enough in individual scenes, and the connection of partial shots is slightly stiff. In addition, the emotional layering of individual character scenes is not rich enough, and the rendering of psychological thriller atmosphere can be further strengthened. In the subsequent optimization and formal shooting stage, I will focus on adjusting the lens switching rhythm, polish the scene details, and combine the light and atmosphere setting to deepen the emotional expression, so that the immersive sense and thematic depth of the work can be further improved.
Overall, this project has helped me systematically master the complete proposal writing and pre-production process of 360 immersive videos, and deeply understand the core production logic of immersive lens language. The tutor’s guidance on perspective switching has corrected my one-sided understanding of immersive shooting, and made me realize that the combination of multiple perspectives is the key to balancing narrative integrity and audience substitution. In the future creation, I will pay more attention to the integration of lens language, emotional expression and theme connotation, flexibly use diversified shooting perspectives, and create more infectious and thoughtful immersive video works.
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