It might sound simple to take 20 GoPro cameras and get a 360 panorama of the Space Needle. It wasn't. Speaking of which, I have a joke for you: How many photogs does it take to screw in a light bulb? Answer: 50. One to do it and 49 to stand around and say, "I coulda done that."
Next time you see a friend who uses GoPro's, ask them how many times out of 20 did they fail to hit record just right, or the card got corrupt, or the battery dies, or computer doesn't recognize the camera, or you took a burst series of images instead of a time-lapse, or on-and-on. Unlike when shooting while hanging with your buddies, a client isn't going to say, "Its cool, bro." when you blow it. I love GoPro's, but even 1 failure out of 20 cameras on a commercial shoot means starting over, whether it was human error, or a solar flare or unicorns messing with space-time.
We could not have done this without Matt and Val. The Space Needle Engineering Staff were the heroes of this operation, going out on the Space Needle "Halo" to install and adjust the 20 GoPro cameras. The most popular tourist questions we're, "Are you gonna bungee jump?" or my favorite "Why are they wearing dress shoes?"
It was certainly an experience to be up there for a few consecutive days and nights. I sorta developed visual "sea legs" to the constant sense of nausea from never having the ground under my feet. Wait, that is misleading. I never went on the Halo, or "lost the bet" as we also told the tourists who wondered why those guys were out there. Rather I mean, looking out and seeing the ground 600' below does funny things to your vision. However, seeing sunsets and sunrises from the Observation deck reassures that Seattle is truly a beautiful city to live in.
Seems simple to throw up a few GoPro's, but to monitor images, and power and ingest data was sorta like playing Whack-a-Mole with technical issues constantly challenging our sense of humor.
Image from Robertsen Ashman
Thanks to Victoria from the use of the wood shop for MacGyver'ing the GoPro housing to accept the HDMI and USB wiring harness.
Despite our feeble attempts of trying his patience, Matt kept a smile on his face.
After the umpteenth nut-check from oblivious children running at full speed out on the observation deck, fielding questions about what we were doing lost its magic. (Don't parents teach kids to say "excuse me" anymore? It seems particularly important and relevant after head-butting a stranger in the crotch to acknowledge the faux-pas with a modicum of tact). The straight-faced reply to these queries brought us the great joy of an inside joke. "We are shooting a bacon mayonnaise commercial." The tourists would say, "Hmm, interesting." as they walked on and their bumbling children would dash into a sprint and clobber the next unsuspecting by-stander trying to take a selfie.