That Time I Met Larry King
Beyond a pleasure to spend some time with him, the King of Interviews.
360VR video clip of Larry and I can be seen at the bottom of the page, and some pictures along the way.
In 2015, our company VRLIVE went to Larry King’s home in Beverly Hills for a project. The plan was to have Larry read a script on camera for this project. We set up the lighting and cameras, and we mic’d him up. We had the script on big cue cards, in fact my biz partner Heiner (The Germanator) just reminded me that Larry wrote a cue card for himself that day also. Larry did a great job, he nailed it, this man was a pro beyond pro’s.
I met his wife and kids, the kids were teenagers, riding around the house on a 2 wheel hoverboard (not the real hoverboards from Back to the Future! You know what I’m talking about.) I tried the hoverboard in the foyer. It was pretty hard to manage, I fell off a few times, but it was fun to laugh and be silly with their family and our camera/tech crew.
We were filming on traditional 2D video for this project, but our real excitement came from filming him also in 360VR. This was new technology, and we were becoming leaders in this style of immersive technology development and VR content creation. So, we hoped to capture an additional interview with Larry that day using our 360VR system, and after showing him the technology, he said he’d be happy to.
So, after the “work” was done on the initial project, we decided to sit down and have a conversation in his den/trophy room and capture it as 360VR. There were many pieces of his life on the shelves that surrounded this room, including Emmy’s, sports memorabilia, pictures, broadcast equipment, etc.
I asked him to tell me about this room and what it means to him, then we spoke about how he has seen technology advance from being on the air before television was invented. Then he saw television, cassettes, cds, the INTERNET, and now, virtual reality. He was a warm, calculated, hospitable, chill man.
With his recent passing I dug up these photos and video again, and I see how he really IS the king of interviews — not just because he was a master at interviewing other people, but because when I asked him questions, he gave the best answers, lengthy and informative, and even included a few stories. I will post the entire conversation in the future, this is just a clip below.
360 VIDEO of Larry and I below, click play and use your arrow keys to scroll around the room in 360:
Thanks Larry, for everything — fly on sir.
ds:]
