The Complications of 360 Degree Video

Before shooting with a 360-degree camera, I really had no clue what to expect. I didn’t know what the camera was going to look like, how it was going to work, or even how I was going to hold it. I thought to myself, “I wouldn’t consider myself to be an expert on cameras. Am I even going to be able to use this thing?” My first experience with a 360-degree camera was nearly a year and a half ago. I was privileged to be tasked with shooting footage of the Brodhead Center and thus, learning how to use a 360-degree camera. The problem is, as I said, that was over a year and a half ago and I haven’t touched the camera since. After my first shoot, I could successfully answer those questions that I previously had to ask myself. Now, I can barely even remember what the camera looks like, let alone how to use it. And so, with the new duty of filming the extravagant Trinity House, I was once again tasked with learning the ins and the outs of the 360-degree camera. Lucky for me, one thing that I do remember is that the camera itself was not that difficult to use. The application, on the other hand, is quite the burden.

The main problem wasn’t the camera itself. The camera that I was using was the Nikon KeyMission 360. It looks like a fist-sized cube and has two curved lenses and image sensors to capture footage from the front and from the back. If I’m being honest, I couldn’t even tell you which side of the camera is the front and which was the back. It has almost perfect symmetry. The directions appeared fairly simple. While the camera was off, it said to hold down the button on the top until the lights were flashing (to send it into pairing mode) and then connect the camera to your phone via Bluetooth. After pairing, connect to the camera’s wifi network and you should be all set up. Finally, you can use the app to remotely start and stop filming as well as view an in-app gallery of footage taken so far.

Now, let me recall for you my experiences with the camera’s pairing capabilities and use of the application. The day of shooting, one of the other interns (Katie) and I spent nearly 30 minutes just trying to get the camera to pair with our phones so that we could use the application. When we picked up the camera from the Office of News and Communications nearly a week before, we practiced pairing it with our phones to make sure that we knew what we were doing. After following the steps over and over again, for close to 20 minutes, the camera finally paired and we were on our way. We knew that there was a chance of these complications happening again but were just hoping that they wouldn’t arise when it came time to shoot. When we tried this in Trinity, it didn’t pair. We tried for a half hour with no luck. We didn’t think it ever would pair. So, we needed to come up with a workaround.

 

The workaround.

We hadn’t practice filming manually because we knew that if we did it this way, we would not be able to view our footage in real time. The camera doesn’t have a digital screen, thus, the only way to view the footage that you have taken is through the application. But, since the application wasn’t working, we had to just go for it. We started filming. We weren’t sure if we were actually capturing any footage because neither of us had tried manually shooting footage with this type of camera before, but had to go for it anyway because it was our only option. Then we realized, “the camera must have an SD card!” For those of you who don’t know what an SD card is, its basically a memory card used in portable devices such as cameras. So, we plugged it into a computer and viewed the gallery of footage. It was working! We were actually capturing footage. Now that we could finally see what we were recording, we wanted to make sure that the footage was visually pleasing. I’ll get into how we shot in a bit, but (through examining the footage) we basically realized that the tripod that the camera was on was sitting too low and needed to be raised.

Without the convenience of the app, we didn’t know whether or not we were getting footage. Even if we were, we didn’t know what it looked like. Eventually coming to the conclusion that the tripod needed to be raised became much more difficult and time-consuming than it needed to be. Although the camera’s specs and shooting capabilities are great (it shoots 360-degree 4K Ultra HD video), due to the inconsistencies and problematic nature of its ability to pair to your phone, I would not recommend it as the top choice for 360-degree video.

 

How we shot.

There were a few approaches to filming that Katie and I could have taken. The first was that we could walk around Trinity with the camera on an attachment and film the dorm as one continuous shot. There were a few problems with this option. The first is there would be a person, relatively close to the camera, in the frame at all times. This would take up a lot of space in the film. Also, if we were walking, there would be a lot of twists and turns trying to navigate around the dorm. If the camera is twisting, that defeats the purpose of the 360-degree video because viewers are supposed to have the freedom of doing this on their own. Lastly, although the dorm is glamorous, not all of it needs to be seen. There are some highlights such as the game room, common rooms, and movie theater, but we really didn’t think that people would care about the hallways and stairwells. To get from one noteworthy place to the next, we would need to pass through these boring places that would make the video long and drawn-out.

The second option was to set the camera down on a tripod, start filming, step out of the frame, leave the camera there for 10-20, and then come back in and stop filming. For the final video, we would then edit the parts with us in them out and stitch together this footage. This is the choice that we decided to go with. It would allow us to present the glorified parts of Trinity House and give the viewer enough time to pan around each room, all while leaving out the uninteresting aspects of the dorm.

Using Canva Animator to Make Even More Awesome Content

One of our social media secret weapons is the online tool Canva, especially since the advent of Instagram Stories last year. Our office relies pretty heavily upon the tool for stylized, easy to build graphics, and now, animated video content as well.

I recently had the opportunity to demo the new Canva beta animations tool on Duke’s Instagram Stories to highlight a very exciting partnership between the university and the American Ballet Theatre.

Canva is a great tool if you’ve got really visual content to accompany any text about your story or research that you want to highlight. In this case, we were fortunate to have some incredible dance photos at our disposal. I knew I wanted to highlight these images and push people to the story via Instagram Stories.

Enter, Canva. The great thing about this tool is its user-friendliness. I was able to login to our office account and design slides using photos and text, just as I would ordinarily. The difference comes in when it is time to export your slides. You’ll notice that there is a new option under “Download” in the top, right navigation bar. Select this new option, “Animated GIF/Movie,” then click “Preview Animation.”

 

This will open the Animator tool:

From here, you can select from any of the six options or “styles” on the right for your animations, which will be demoed on the slides you have created. Once you are satisfied with your selected animation form, you have the option to download them as either a GIF or .mp4 file. For example, @DukeUEnergy recently used the tool to create a GIF that they rolled out on Twitter:

 

For the purpose of our Instagram Stories, I selected “Download as Movie.”  Then the file will be downloaded to your computer. Here is our final product:

 

We’re not quite done yet. Because all four slides were created in one Canva document and not individually downloaded, they exported into one, 28-second long video. Instagram Stories will only allow 10-second long clips for each part of the story. So I had to do a bit of tedious editing on my end. First, I emailed the .mp4 file to my iPhone. Then, I went into my camera roll and edited the whole video down into separate clips featuring each slide. I saved each edited segment as a new video file, so as not to lose the original 28-second video. The end result was 4, 7-10 second long videos featuring only one of each of the animated slides. I was then able to upload these, in order, to our Instagram Stories.

The result when it played back was one seamless “video” on our Stories. With the video broken into 4 separate parts, I was also able to attach a link on to each segment of our Story that sent viewers directly to the Duke Today article about the partnership. The end result can be viewed on Instagram’s mobile interface as a feature on @DukeUniversity‘s account.

This whole process took me less than an hour. With a little creativity to work around the Stories time limit function, Canva Animator is a really great tool to easily make videos with a highly produced feel with (very little, at least on my part) video skill.

Facebook’s Algorithm Changes & What It Means for Brands

Doooooooon’t freak out…but we are here to talk about the Facebook algorithm.

Huh?

In January 2018, Facebook announced it would be changing its news feed algorithm to prioritize content from “friends, family and groups.”

Zuckerberg himself said that his team would be “making a major change to how we build Facebook” including promising users that they’ll see “less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media.”

 

Explain yourself! What does it all mean?

Content directly from publishers won’t perform as well unless people engage with it, which means businesses are going to have to work harder than ever to gain their customers’ attention on the platform.

“I expect that the amount of distribution for publishers will go down because a lot of publisher content is just passively consumed and not talked about.”- VP of News Feed Adam Mosseri via TechCrunch

 

TL;DR

The winners: Users/Facebook

They should find Facebook less of a black hole of wasted time viewing mindless video clips and guilty-pleasure articles.

Long-term, it should preserve Facebook’s business & ensure it’s still a major provider for referral traffic for news publishers and marketers, just less than before.

 

The losers: Publishers

Many have shifted resources to invest in eye-catching, pre-recorded social videos, etc. in recent years. It sounds like this will no longer be a productive use of time.

 

Now. Here’s the good news:

As for definitive, long-term effects? The general consensus is that time will tell.

Mosseri admits that he expects publishers to react with “a certain amount of scrutiny and anxiety,” but didn’t have many concrete answers about how they should react beyond “experimenting … and seeing … what content gets more comments, more likes, more reshares.”

So for us that means business as usual in terms of creating the most compelling content. Our goal has always been ENGAGEMENT (shares/comments), but now more than ever.

 

So what now?*

Continue creating quality content that will promote conversation amongst users.

Experiment more with Live Video as it seems like it will be prioritized based on the engagement it gets on the platform.

Think about investing time in Facebook Groups as they are prioritized over Pages.

Brush up on your Ad spending skills & increase your budget.

*Via Hootsuite.

Even the Trees Are Fall-ing for Duke

Inspiration

There is no place like Duke during the autumn months. Fall is already one of my favorite seasons, but something about fall on Duke’s campus is just breathtaking. Every year, Duke’s social media pages launch a #DukeFall campaign where Dukies everywhere are flooded with vibrant photos of the seasonal changes happening on campus, on their timelines and Instagram feeds. During my first two years at Duke, I never really paid much attention to the fall leaves changing. It always seemed to happen in the blink of an eye. Yes, Duke University is a gorgeous campus, but leaf watching was not on my radar. However, this year I wanted to capture this beautiful and colorful time of the year in a unique way. So I decided to create a time lapse of the leaves changing colors on a single tree on West Campus.

The Process

When I envisioned this project in its final form, I knew I wanted it to look like the tree was changing colors over the course of one day.  So I first found my subject, a sprawling oak tree that stands in the shadow of the magnificent Duke Chapel.  When it was time to film, I set up my camera in roughly the same spot, at about the same time each day.  For this particular time lapse, I positioned my camera at the center of Abele Quad.  In that spot, my tree takes center stage with the chapel in the background.  Then the waiting game began for this beautiful oak to turn vibrant orange.  In the beginning, the process was kind of like watching paint dry. It was slow and not very eventful.  But by week three, a glimmer of hope, as a tiny patch of orange peeked through the green canopy.  Signs of fall at last!

For 8 weeks, this tree project really captured my attention. For the first two, I relied on calendar alerts to remind me that it was time to go out and film.  Every Friday at noon, I would set up my tripod and record for about 30 minutes, to ensure that I collected enough footage of people passing by once the film was sped up. Then by the third week, it became part of my routine.  Eventually my whole family was consumed by the changing of the tree.  At one point during this process, my parents would call to check up on me and the changing tree!  I will say, this project was quite the conversation starter. I met a lot of wonderful people while standing on the quad waiting for the leaves to change color.  People would come up  and ask “What are you filming?”  I replied, “I’m filming that tree as the leaves change colors.”  The spectators were a little bit surprised but also very intrigued.  After weeks of waiting, my coveted tree was finally filled with beautiful orange leaves in all its fall splendor.

When I started the project, I must admit I was a little nervous about how the video would turn out.  Prior to this video, I hadn’t made a time lapse of this magnitude. After I gathered all the footage I needed, I found myself becoming a bit emotional and enlightened.  After 8 weeks of filming, I came to realize some very important things:  First, I’m so lucky to attend a university like Duke. Secondly, patience really is a virtue. And finally, there’s beauty in everything if you just take the time to find it!  Recording this tree was an eye-opening experience for me.  It allowed me to take a step back and observe. As students, we tend to forget that there’s more to campus life than just classes, parties, and grades. Watching this simple oak tree assume it’s fall glory, revealed to me that every moment of our college experience is precious and shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Animoji in Motion: How Duke Announced the 2018 Commencement Speaker

Commencement season is one of my favorite parts of working in higher ed communications. Gearing up to send a fresh batch of Dukies out into the world, all glowing with accomplishment and brimming with promise, makes for a lot of work and long days, but is one of the most personally gratifying projects I work on each year.

And when your boss hands down the task of coming up with an innovative new way to announce this year’s commencement speaker, it’s time to get pretty creative. After all, we announce a commencement speaker every year, and we’ve done it the same way for as long as anyone can remember. But at Duke, we like to think of ourselves as “big idea people.” We aim for the Pie In The Sky and see where we land. We’re also fortunate to have an extremely supportive team of leaders who encourage us to think BIG and run with it. And this time we really went for it.

We learned that Apple CEO Tim Cook would be this year’s commencement speaker only a few weeks after the launch of the iPhone X, which gave Apple’s jazzy Animoji ads just enough time to make the rounds on social media. In our team’s brainstorming meeting, I threw out the idea of making something similar to announce Cook as this year’s speaker and things snowballed from there into the end result: two students and Duke President Vincent Price – and their Animojis – introducing Cook as our commencement speaker.

We could have rolled the video on our social channels and left it at that, but since we really wanted to make a splash with the students, we arranged to have the video on the jumbotron at Cameron Indoor Stadium during a Duke men’s basketball game.  And the reaction was better than we could have ever hoped for.

What everyone didn’t see was the weeks of hard work and late nights that went into making this project. Here’s a look at some of the behind-the-scenes work (and play) that made the magic happen:

Duke’s Director of Social Media & Content Strategy, Sonja Foust, playing guinea pig for our lighting test.

Sanford School of Public Policy MPP candidate Kavya Sakar films with her Animoji.

Senior Matthew King during filming.

Really testing out that facial recognition software.

Even Duke’s President Vincent Price was game.  Behold, a series:

And here’s a look at how those of us not lucky enough to be designated as “talent” spent the day:

Special thanks to our hosts for the day of filming in Blue Devil Tower, Chad Lampman, Executive Director of the Blue Devil Network.

Kristen Brown, AVP of News, Communications & Media, gives the Animojis a try in between filming. We’re big fans of the bunny.

Taking my job as Chief Fly Away Wrangler v seriously.

Me (appalled at how we are STILL in the studio some 9 hours later) along with Duke’s AVP of News & Global Communications, Laura Brinn, and VP for Public Affairs and Government Relations, Mike Schoenfeld, who loved watching the process from the monitors as President Price recorded his lines.

 

 

 

3 Things We’re Doing Wrong in Higher Ed Social Media

1. Calling Snapchat “dead.”

Yeah, the redesign makes your life harder. Are you going to friend all of your students so that your story shows up in their friend feed, or are you going to be content with showing up in the “Discover” tab? You decide, but know that incoming students aren’t giving up Snapchat anytime soon. We’re just going to have to figure out a way to engage. And speaking of engagement…

2. Failing to engage.

We’re really used to broadcasting. We broadcast all the time. We tweet and share links to our sites. We tell people what we want them to know. Increasingly, though, our incoming students and our other community members are looking for engagement. So, yeah, we’re going to have to do some one-on-one stuff, which takes some man/woman-power. And looking ahead, we’re going to have to engage both in the messaging apps we already use (have you checked your Facebook Page inbox recently?) and in the apps we’re going to have to learn to use, like WeChat and WhatsApp.

3. Using YouTube as a video bucket.

Your YouTube channel isn’t just a place where you can chuck all your video content so that you can embed it elsewhere. YouTube is a social platform. Yep, and it’s getting to be even more social with the addition of the community tab and a coming-soon Stories-like feature. You’re going to have to roll your YouTube strategy into your general social media strategy, so start laying the groundwork now to get control of YouTube on your team.

Instagram Stories vs. Snapchat

Communicators, particularly those in higher ed, were perplexed to say the least when Instagram Stories launched in August 2016 as a direct challenge to Snapchat. We were even more surprised when the app reported in 2017 that after one year, Instagram Stories had more than 250 million daily users.

In the premiere episode of Extra Credit, we break down the pros and cons of both tools and try to help our fellow #HESM professionals make wise choices about how to spend their time and energy on both:

How #HigherEd can use Snapchat Custom Stories for social media student takeovers (via collegewebeditor.com)

I’ve believed for a while that the most fun part of working with social media is throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. Trying new things is intimidating, but there are always lessons to be learned in success and/or failure.

When Snapchat announced Custom Stories at the end of May, all higher ed social media professionals asked themselves the same question: “What does this mean for us?”

After poking around the new features, I thought it might allow us to take a different approach to student takeovers.

The new update happened to launch the same week we had content scheduled to congratulate high school seniors who will attend Texas A&M in the fall. This campaign included a Snapchat takeover with two future Aggies on two very different sides of the country – one in California and one in Texas, but 200 miles from campus.

Only one person can be logged into a Snapchat account at any given time, but by using the new Custom Story feature, our two future Aggies were able to do their takeover at the same time…

 

Read more here.

Creating Your Own On-Demand Snapchat Filter: A Step-by-Step Guide

As a designer for Duke’s Office of News & Communications, one of my favorite things to work on were our campus Snapchat filters. We typically host an on-demand filter for big events on campus such as basketball games, cultural performances, football games, and holidays. Not even a decade-old, Snapchat has grown to be one of the most popular social media platforms for millennials, with more than 9,000 snaps sent per second. Whether you’re a publicity executive for an organization that has an event coming up or a someone who wants to make a great birthday present for a friend, you too can create your own personalized Snapchat filter! Without further ado, here’s a quick step-by-step guide:

 

Visit snapchat.com/geofilters and click the “Create Now” button under the “Community” tab. Log into your Snapchat account.

On the following screen, hover over the “Download Template” link to either download the PSD or AI templates. Either template works – just choose the software that you’re most comfortable with.

Next, check out the submission guidelines on the bottom of the screen to get a general idea of what is okay and what isn’t.

Now you can start designing! Brainstorm what visuals might work with the theme of your event. You should always have a short phrase of some sorts that’s presented in a visually appealing and engaging way. Be sure to make the content pop so it’ll be visible in either broad daylight or the evening. And remember, NO HASHTAGS allowed in the design (or it won’t be approved).

After you’ve made a filter that follows the Snapchat guidelines, you can upload it! Visit snapchat.com/geofilters/submit.html and click the large white box on the right that says “Upload Geofilter Asset.” Enter your name, email, and check the two boxes on the bottom.

Select the date and time range you want your filter to be useable.

Search the map for the area that you wish to have your geofilter shown. Then, draw a box around the area with Snapchat’s mapping tool. The bigger the area, the more your filter will cost.

Now you’re almost done! Click “Submit.” Snapchat will contact you in a couple of hours letting you know if they’ve approved your filter. If approved, they’ll bill the account that you’ve linked.

Finally, keep an eye out for your filter on the designated dates!

 

And that’s how to make your own personalized Snapchat filter. They’re an easy and fun way to engage with your followers. Plus, if a follower uses your filter, all their friends who see the filter will also know about you. Good luck and have fun designing!

 

Live Video: Higher Ed and Beyond

2016 was undoubtedly the year of live video. Although YouTube was one of the first social media platforms to introduce live video in 2011, Facebook’s introduction of Facebook Live at the end of 2015 was the catalyst that sparked the beginning of the live video movement. It didn’t take long for this new broadcasting medium to catch on with viewers, leading Instagram and Twitter to follow suit with their own live features a year later.

Live video is authentic, engaging, and powerful, demonstrated by its quick rise to popularity and high engagement rates among viewers and broadcasters alike. Compared to 2014, 81% of internet and mobile users watched more live video in 2015. Out of all of the social media platforms that currently have a live video feature, Facebook Live sees the most traffic of live video viewers. On average, viewers comment 10 times more on Facebook live videos than on regular videos. Viewers’ attention spans are also longer during live videos, with the average viewer watching a live video 3 times longer than a typical video.

How are people using this new portable broadcasting medium? Companies and organizations may broadcast live during news announcements, performances, behind the scenes tours, demos, interviews, and more – the possibilities are endless. Those that come to mind for many social media users are live videos by individuals that document their personal experiences, whether in a serious or casual setting. My personal favorite is Candace Payne’s Chewbacca Mask video, which holds the current record for the most viewed Facebook Live video at 160 million views.

While it may be obvious for some individuals and organizations of what they should use live video to broadcast to users, higher education institutions have differed in their experimentation with live video. The most popular live video platform used by universities remains Facebook Live – although many have not yet stepped into the realm of live video at all. However, over 85% of universities have a presence on YouTube, demonstrating that the vast majority of universities understand the importance of video in engaging their audiences. It’s exciting to see more and more institutions use live videos on social media to reach new audiences and provide a different and immediate digital experience for their viewers. The majority of higher education institutions use Facebook Live in a way that reflects the type of content they publish. This is frequently demonstrated by live streaming of lectures, speeches, and notable events on campus. Duke recently streamed it’s 2017 commencement ceremonies (above) and the first press conference by Duke President-Elect Vincent Price.

During these videos, many of the videographers utilize Facebook Live API, allowing them to broadcast using a professional camera rather than through a mobile device. While using live video for these types of events can be effective, live video provides an avenue to do something different than what might normally be done through video. Since live videos in essence become regular videos once the live stream has ended, live videos should sometimes take the opportunity to distinguish themselves through content and style. Broadcasting live events can draw an audience, depending on the anticipation of said event and whether it is time-sensitive or crisis related. However, in order to truly make the most of what live video has to offer, making use of all of its features, such as live chat, will be vital.

Live videos can be used to allow social media users across the globe to glean an intimate and personal experience of life at the university. Social media is increasingly becoming a space where brands are expected to be authentic and expressive, while social media in and of itself is a place where corporations and individuals alike can let their personalities shine. I hope that universities will be at the forefront of using live video in creative and innovative ways to captivate their audiences. Vanderbilt has used live video to bring prospective students on virtual tours on campus while fielding questions using live chat. Here at Duke we have used live video to allow online viewers to ask questions to professor and author Dan Ariely during a Q&A with students in Perkins library.

Watch live: Duke professor Dan Ariely runs a demonstration of his new book, "Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations." The book reveals insights into motivation and what drives people — how it works and how we can use this knowledge to approach important choices in our own lives.In this Facebook Live, Ariely is asking students to participate in solving a puzzle for money … or pizza, demonstrating the complexity of what motivates people.Leave questions for Dan in the comments.

Posted by Duke University on Sunday, November 20, 2016

 

The world of live video combines the immediacy of live TV with its ability to immerse millions into the same place and moment, the omnipresent and immediate nature of social media and mobile phones, and the ever-transforming landscape of technology. With live video, the sky’s the limit and you’re the director. I’m looking forward to seeing how this versatile and immersive tool will empower higher education institutions and individuals alike to create, engage, and connect.