The New Forest & Hampshire County Show is a three day agricultural show held in Brockenhurst, Hampshire, at the end of July each year. What began in 1921 as a small one-day local event has burgeoned in size and popularity, now attracting around 95,000 visitors over the 3 days. Google Trusted Photographers Striking Faces, the obvious choice being animal-friendly and in possession of their fully equipped working mobile office, were delighted to be commissioned to lend their expertise to this event. During the initial discussions with the promotion team it became apparent that this was the perfect opportunity to use Google Street View technology to showcase a very large outdoor space in the form of Google Views.
Google Views is another Google product used to publish photo spheres to Google Maps. Individual spheres can be published alone or linked together to create a constellation. There were a number of major considerations which affected this decision. The most obvious was that the show and the 600 exhibitor stands are only standing for 3 days.
Creating a constellation of spherical nodes and transforming these into a virtual tour would enable the promoters to showcase specific elements of the events long after the event had finished. It could be used as a marketing tool to attract exhibitors potential sponsors. The shows marketing team were very to eager to use the 360 virtual tour in conjunction with the site map and accompanying written material, using the tour to demonstrate the true nature of the event as it is in reality.
Click into The New Forest Show from the image below.
The shoot had it own challenges, namely that the crowds meant it was impossible to shoot after 10:30. Striking Faces made maximum use of their fully equipped mobile office during the day and managed to upload and begin the post-production processing of the imagery. Once the majority of the visitor had made their way off-site the team were able to carry on shooting and continue way into the evening utilising the late summer sunsets.
The final product involved hundreds hours of preparation, shooting, processing and editing. The delivered tour captured over 220 spherical nodes all precisely connected and published to Google Maps.
There were a few interesting highlights. Shooting the inside of a hearse was a first! The Co-op Funeral Care were there and we did the inside of three of their hearses. If you have ever wondered what the inside of hearse looks like, take a look for yourself! Also the BBC has their own stand and we had enormous fun shooting with crew. See if you can find the Woodland Trust tent, which is beautiful inside with much to feast your eyes on!
(16 September 2014)
Leave a Reply