Client: The Bishop Strachan School, Toronto
Project: SkyView Virtual Campus Tour for Admissions
The Bishop Strachan School in Toronto is a prestigious, 150-year-old academy for girls that attracts students from around the world. In 2021, the Covid pandemic forced administrators to close the campus to visitors. This prevented prospective students and their families from touring the school’s impressive grounds, classrooms, dorms, and amenities.
The Problem
The absence of in-person tours complicated efforts to secure a decision from parents and guardians to enroll their child or children in the school.
An initial workaround entailed inviting prospective families to view a video tour the school had produced years earlier. However, the conventional two-dimensional video was an inadequate showcase of what the school offered, especially during virtual meetings when scrolling forward and backwards through the video timeline proved to be cumbersome.
The Solution
Administrators determined that the answer was to replace the existing video tour with an immersive, 360-degree, three-dimensional, fully interactive version. Additionally – the new experience needed to showcase the warmth and culture of the campus, and not just the facilities themselves. BSS needed to find a way to enhance the typical real estate touring experience with student-guided videos so that the audience could feel a welcoming and inviting tone from the tour.
For that task, The Bishop Strachan School chose virtual-experiences creator 360Pros.
Production
Working closely with the school’s in-house creative and technical teams, 360Pros Founder and Chief Creative Officer Boris Maganic mapped out production of a breathtakingly beautiful virtual tour that would allow prospective families to “walk through” every square inch of the school, glide through the sky above for a bird’s-eye view of the campus, and feel as if they had been there without actually having been.
Once the tour blueprint was finalized, 360Pros calendared a weekend to begin capturing video—drone footage first, interior 360 photography afterward, with green-screen student videos on location to end on. All of it was meticulously sequenced, staged, and executed to maximize production efficiency, minimize costs, and avoid disrupting the school.
During post-production, 360Pros edited out distracting visuals—digitally erasing the wild scribblings on one classroom’s whiteboard, for instance—in order to deliver a flawless product which was easy to publish to the BSS website, as well as share as a standalone web link.
The Results Are In…
School officials expressed delight with the finished interactive 3D tour, a powerful piece of immersive digital storytelling that prospective families can access any time, day or night, to freely explore every nook and cranny of the school from every angle and every vantage point, high or low.
“The virtual tour has been viewed by many with lots of families praising its participation in helping them choose BSS over other schools that they received offers from. We really captured the essence of the school with the aerial and outdoor shots; and having a student ambassador narrate portions of the tour is an added bonus to its interactivity.”
Continuity
The campus has since reopened to in-person tours now that the pandemic has abated, but administrators said the virtual visits facilitated by the 360Pros product will remain an important piece of the school’s recruitment efforts. For example, it will allow families living overseas to avoid long international travel for a look around while at the same time enabling families living within easy driving distance to tour in person and then afterward go online to revisit everything seen on campus.
The Bishop Strachan School Executive Director of Enrolment Hilary Adamson said the campus virtual tour created by 360Pros isn’t likely to become outdated, either. “We have the option to continue working with 360Pros to add more video footage, more images, more interactivity, more immersive engagement—basically to evolve what we have so that it stays up-to-date with the evolution of the school itself,” she said. “I’m glad we chose to work with 360Pros.”