ABOUT

This is the first in a new series of sessions Global Media are curating for the Big Top 40 and the newly launched Vodafone Voxi. Mullally's taking over the VOXI Unframed Studio to perform his absolute BOP, 'Wonderful'. Watch the video in 360 by dragging your frame to look where you want.

Vodafone has launched Voxi – a standalone, SIM-only network designed for under 25s that is putting young creatives at the very heart of its marketing strategy. Voxi aims to entice a young audience by taking the use of social and chat apps out of data allowance calculations. Music and video are key to their platform, and this series was designed for the beginning of their marketing push.

We worked with Global Media to create a 360 stage studio for emerging artists performing new music in series of sessions to be released each month. Ross Anderson directed, and the excellent guys from Visualise VR provided the camera, DOP and postproduction. I love how crisp and spot-on they get their work!

The series will run through 2018, watch this space for future instalments...

The Official Vodafone Big Top 40 Breaker is Mullally, a pop-soul singer from Great Yarmouth. At the age of 16, Mullally began his venture into music, playing the guitar in a band with three of his best friends, before he went solo at 18. Now, at the age of 20, Mullally has amassed over six million streams and was announced as one of the Top 3 finalists of the MOBO Unsung Competition. Inspired by the likes of Paolo Nutini and Amy Winehouse, Mullally has gone on to play some of the UK's biggest festivals, including Latitude, Reading and Leeds.

We had a black box and one day to film.

We needed a all-encompassing studio set for the UNFRAMED series. We wanted to shoot in all directions at once for a 360 video, and seam them together so the performers could have 'multiple performances' at the same time and be engaging no matter where the viewer looked. No dead spaces, there needed to be something interesting happening everywhere. The main media platform would be a mobile phone. The camera would be positioned in the middle of the room, so it was just starting from that exact view and designing outwards within a spherical point of perspective, remembering how small the format would end up. How far away we could put 'things' from the camera. We worked backwards filling a 7M square space and made a little model with lipsticks and iPhones, sitting cross-legged on the floor, seeing how we could create interesting neon shapes around the band in 360. We then mocked up a digital animatic and then tested it out!

Then the build: fabricating neon flex shapes and building cubes. Everything needed to be designed to be modular, so we could run in like ninjas, set it up for the first time for some crazy digital perfecting on the part of Visualise, shoot it, and then pack away in trucks within an 11 hour studio day.

The brief needed to include branding from Voxi, The Big Top 40 and the band. We incorporated projectors to cast the lyrics as they were sung. We created space as a 'void' with neon/electric elements for the band to interact with.

I love 360! Have a play with your cursor and look in every direction!

We connected the brands by using bright white neon shapes in the same geometry of their logos, echoing their own artwork. The cables and lines represented connectivity that is the very ethos behind the Voxi brand. We worked in subtle Big Top 40 artwork by incorporating it into the architecture of the set pieces, rather than have standalone plant-on ‘branding’.

The pilot instalment was a success launching the series to be filmed throughout this year. This is a great platform for new media and these unsigned bands to get exposure in an exciting new medium. We are currently prepping to shoot the second in the series later this month with another new artist.

The Big Top 40 are running a competition that encourages watching the video and looking for Easter Eggs.