Oslo 2011 Skiing: A Multimedia Approach

Been here now three days: fog, rain, snow… It is a question of choosing your profession, I guess, but I just don’t enjoy being wet all the time — nor does my camera equipment. Plus in this total “grayness” it is hard to make photo­graphy worth showing.

But yesterday I made something which I consider might be worth sharing.

In November during the Ruka WC I got an idea that I’d like to do a multi­media on the super modern servicetruck the Norwegian team had there. I talked about it with Miia Vatka — journalist in the Lapin Kansa — and she was totally into the idea.

She did an incre­dible job of arranging the whole thing and getting us access — and yesterday we finally did it. I’m totally wrong person to comment the result — and it’s not as slick and smooth as I would have liked it to be — but at least it’s a bit different approach. Infor­mative as well I do dare say. It is presently displayed on most of the Alma Media websites. Click the image below to view it.

As I said it has been really foggy, so I could not make the exterior shot as I would have liked it to be. I had planned a “little planet” ie.stereoscopic 300° pano, but with the visibility of c. 50m or less, that was not an option.

The interior shots worked out alright — but I had huge difficulties in stitching. I used four images of FOV 180° with a circular fish eye (8mm) and Canon 5D mrk2 and somehow the patterns of the vertical lines that the skies made in the images threw my stitching program totally off-balance.

It was not a question of parallax-issues that much — even though I used a monopod with a Nodal Ninja ring-attachment instead of a tripod and a decent pano-head — but something else totally. I had to add most of the control points manually and I could not get the zenith nor the nadir to work at all. Thus you do notice the boarders I set in the pano-images (i.e. you cannot see the floor nor the ceiling) — which is not typical for my work in general.

But — as a whole, I was pretty pleased with the result. It works- at least I think so. The audio was done on Zoom H1 and edited in Soundtrack. I did do ambient audio as well — I had planned to do a clean interview / voiceover with panned ambient audio, but when I tested it the result was too blurry and confusing, so I decided to skip it — as the interview was far from clean… ;-)

I had no time to do any decent/original web design, so I just pulled a template I used in the Vancouver Olympics, modified it a bit and embedded the whole thing on that.

It took some 5–6 hours of editing — which I did amidst yesterdays compe­ti­tions. It was much more than I had antici­pated — and as a result I had to skip doing the iPad/iPhone ‑version. Not that many people look at this with iDevices… but I thought it would have been a nice touch.

In addition to the multi­media above, I just made a small gallery of my images so far over here. Nothing to write home about, but just to show something. I keep adding more images to the gallery as the games progress. And this is iPad/iPhone compatible.