We arrived at the Tidal Basin here in DC before sunrise on a Sunday morning early in April. It was the first weekend of peak bloom for the cherry blossoms. Anne and I had been waiting for the blossoms to peak for several weeks but because of cold weather, which didn’t want to let go, the blossoms were late. But when they finally reached peak bloom they looked fantastic. Once again we mounted the Sony F5 camera on the DJI Ronin Gimbal and attached it to the bike. You can read more about the bike cam here;

Mounting a Sony PMW F5 on a DJI 3 Axis Ronin attached to a Bicycle

We shot 4K Slog-2, color corrected in DaVinci Resolve and did the final edit in Avid. I did add some extras in After Effects, using Trapcode Particular. I created some falling petals and added them to two scenes.

We also rented the Insta360 Pro VR camera and shot footage of the blossoms in 8K @ 30fps. I will post some of that footage at a later date. However I did use one scene from the VR camera in the 1:30 sequence. I stitched together a 10 second scene in VR, brought it into After Effects and using the VR comp editor in After Effects (formally Skybox) I warp- stabilized the scene and key framed a section of the footage orienting the equirectangular footage looking up into the trees. I rendered the VR scene out in HD1080 format and cut it into the final sequences.

Sony F5 with DJI Ronin mounted on a bike filming the cherry blossoms in Washington, DC.