Swim with wild dolphins in your own home through virtual reality
The Dolphin Swim Club came to us with a revolutionary vision. Let the whole world experience swimming with wild dolphins anytime and anywhere through virtual reality. So we helped them to create some stunning footage of wild dolphins. The mission of The Dolphin Swim Club is to film the most beautiful 360 video footage ever made of wild dolphins. Through Virtual reality, this footage will be accessable by anyone on the planet. Whether it’s for fun, but also for healthcare purposes by treating anxiety disorders for example. We worked on the production of the 360° videos, a brand new website and several promotional videos.
After almost a year of preperation and research, lots of brainstorm sessions and overcoming various obstacles, we did it. We filmed more than 80 wild spinner, and bottlenose dolphins each day for a whole week. Location: the Red Sea in Egypt.
The only way to pull this of was getting the best experts together on one boat. A dedicated team that has a profounding love for dolphins and understands the risks and rules that come to play at a shoot like this. From the cook and shipper to the divers, cameracrew and researchers. This was the right crew for the right job. In order to get the most out of 6 days of filming, good logistics where crucial on a production like this. Therefor the production crew was devided in to two teams. While one team was in the water filming, the team on the boat focussed on backing up the footage from an earlier run on two hard drives.
After 7 days of filming, salty camera’s and terabytes of data it was time to head home. But here, a new phase would start; post-production on 75 takes and creating a marketing strategy for getting this footage out in the world. After we made selections of the best footage we started working out a plan where this footage was going to be used for. After all; post-producing a clip for a TV commercial needs a totally different approach than a clip that is used for anxiety disorder treatment… We spend more than a month on stitching, color grading, sound design and editing the footage in 4K resolution.
Checkout the making-of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjP6OFBmE28
And visit The Dolphin Swim Club website: http://thedolphinswimclub.com
