Specialized Bicycles — Fast Company 360
The problem
Microsoft wanted Fast Company's readers inside the rooms where products are invented. A written tour of an innovation lab is a press release; the point was to let someone stand in it.
The approach
Shoot the room rather than the interview — 360 capture that holds the whole space at once, so a reader in a headset can look at whatever they would have looked at had they been standing there.
What was built
Two dual-lens 360 rigs run through a single working day inside the lab, stitched and cut for the series.
The outcome
Published by Fast Company in August 2019.
Written along the walls of Specialized Bicycles’ Silicon Valley innovation lab are the words “innovate or die.” It is the building where the company’s designers and engineers work out what a bicycle is going to be in a few years’ time, which makes it exactly the kind of room that does not photograph well and does not explain itself in prose.
Microsoft commissioned Fast Company to go behind the scenes at a set of innovation labs, and the brief went to virtual reality for a straightforward reason: a space is the subject. A flat shot chooses what you look at. In a headset the room stays whole, and the viewer spends their attention where their own curiosity sends it — at the prototype on the bench, or at the person explaining it, or at the wall of frames nobody mentioned.
Fast Company’s series ran to five labs in all. This is the Specialized film — shot in April 2019 on two dual-lens 360 rigs and published that August. The other four are named here only to place it; they were made by other hands.
Four minutes of the finished cut are below — the lab itself, benches and prototypes included.
What 360 costs you
Shooting a working lab in 360 removes the two things a crew normally relies on. There is no off-camera: the lights, the cases, the second operator and the director all have to be somewhere that is not in frame, in a room that is entirely in frame. And there is no reframing in the edit — the coverage decision is made at the moment of placement, because every direction is already recorded and none of them can be changed later.
What it buys is the thing a bicycle company’s innovation lab actually is, which is not a series of objects but a room where a lot of unfinished ideas are sitting out at once.
Written along the walls of Specialized's innovation lab are the words "innovate or die."