‘HELP’ is Google Spotlight Stories’ first immersive, live action film made uniquely for mobile.

Google Spotlight Stories launched in October 2013 as a new storytelling platform for the mobile audience. A classic tale of explosions, aliens, heroines and heroes, 'HELP' is the fourth story in the series. The difference is the story lives within the mobile device, providing a unique window through which the audience can view the film from any angle, 360 degrees around as they’re gently guided through the action and given visual cues.

In the context of recent immersive or VR productions, 'HELP' is groundbreaking in that it combines live action and computer graphics in a 360 environment, creating an action-driven narrative with cinema-quality visual effects.

Involved across every aspect of 'HELP', we collaborated from the planning stage to assist the director, the production company and the Google team in realizing their ambitious cinematic vision.

Challenged with developing a 360-degree immersive film of blockbuster proportions, a technological shortfall was realized: there was no software that could pull VR footage through from the 360-degree camera rig, allowing it to be reviewed on-set, in real-time, as a director normally would shooting a linear film. Together with the production company, we had developed a 360-degree camera rig with wide angle lenses that enabled them to capture the full field of view in full cinema quality, but they needed a way to review the content filmed live on set. This would give the director the ability to follow the action in the way the he desired.

After numerous tests, experimentation and R&D, we developed 'Mill Stitch' (TM pending), a proprietary hardware-software solution that takes images from multiple cameras and then stitches the output into a continuous 360-degree view. This on-set solution provided the Justin Lin and the director of photography with the unique ability to dynamically move the camera to follow the high-intensity action that is the dramatic hallmark of 'HELP'. During post-production, a more refined version of Mill Stitch was used in tandem with several other proprietary Mill software tools to rebuild a seamless drama combining live-action and vast CG environments.

Alongside the new pipeline and desktop tools, The Mill created an app that allowed for daily viewing on a tablet so the director could review the film after every shoot.

Collaborating with the director, production company and Google’s team of experts allowed us to help create a new way of experiencing cinema.

'HELP' is available for free within the Google Spotlight Stories app via Google Play.