Quest Labs VR

This is a 360° video! Click and drag to check it out...

The Olympia Expo. A weekend of muscles, spray tans, and bags-on-bags of free samples. As a brand that grew up in the sports nutrition category, Quest had attended the show since the brand's infancy and attracted long lines of excited fans.

But... how to stand out in an increasingly packed and noisy convention center? And how to generate some buzz with an audience already so familiar with Quest?

We decided to completely reinvent the expo booth experience and take our fans on a sci-fi adventure to Quest Labs - the fictional planet where Quest products were created by our food scientists.

Instead of a regular sampling booth, we created a giant blue-lit box, mysteriously called the "launch station." Fans would queue outside for their turn to be guided into our shuttle launch bay, where they would don a VR headset. Our 360° video would take them to another galaxy and a guided tour of Quest Labs; on arrival they would remove their headset and, now at the "lab," get a special sample of our yummy prototypes.

My team and I set about creating the launch video; an ambitious blend of practical sets that would represent different rooms of our space station, and visual FX made more complex by the need for a 360° perspective.

Because 360° cameras were a relatively new technology, we really had no guidebook - this was a true case of "getting creative" and working through our own solutions. 

We worked with a camera system called the Jaunt One which had not yet been publicly released. It was really 24 cameras capturing footage that could be stitched together using proprietary software.

We also needed to find a way to create 360° effects and settled on a plug-in called SkyBox that basically created a virtual cube within After Effects. We could now begin to build layers of our planet environments (outside of the "windows" of our practical sets), as well as the space sequences that would be 100% CGI.

Our Olympia fans were certainly intrigued - lining up around our convention center "block" to find out what was going on inside the Quest booth. It remains one of the most unique experiences I've seen at any fitness show. This one was a true labor of love, and lots of blood, sweat and tears went into its creation. I wouldn't recommend making a 360° video in 2016 to the faint of heart... but with the right team of equally crazy creatives, anything's possible!