Three graduate students at CSU East Bay are using a new technique of filming to give viewers an all-around movie experience as a part of their thesis project.

Mustafa Ebrahimi, 29, Martin Wood, 26, and Scott Fowler, 25, are filming a short movie called Concealed 360, which, as they put it, is an interactive film using 360-degree audio-visual exploration to show how one’s personal perspective affects their interpretation of narrative.

The idea for the video was Wood’s, as he has a background in filming music videos.

“I was thinking about Google Earth and how you could see whatever you want,” said Wood. “I was thinking, let’s take Google Earth and all that content around and make a movie out of it.”

Ebrahimi, Wood and Fowler said there is two parts to the movie, mainly the film and the interactive experience.

“Traditional films are shot with one camera and only showing what the director wants you to see,” said Ebrahimi. “Our film is [an] interactive shot with six cameras showing all of the 360-degree space, allowing the viewer to be able to pan around and choose their own content that they would like to see.”

Fowler, in the meantime, has been working on the script for the movie, which is about amateur drug trafficker Dillon Wagner, who emerges from a coma and tries to figure out how he ended up in a hospital.

In addition to his memory loss, he finds out that his closest friend and drug connection Joey Valeri was murdered. Not knowing why or by whom, Wagner desperately tries to piece together the last few days leading up to the murder.

The film will enable users to pan 360 degrees in a hexagonal format while taking in the action of each scene as it unfolds in order to solve the murder mystery.

“Viewers will sit down in a booth with a trackball next to you with three monitors and pan around and watch what you want to watch,” said Ebrahimi.

“It’s not just a movie, it’s also the experience when you watch it,” added Wood. “You almost direct your own movie when you watch it; when you’re looking at it, you get to pan around for whatever content you want to consume.”

The film itself has cost the students around $10,000 to $12,000. According to Ebrahimi, they have been paying for all expenses out of their own pockets since the start of the project in June 2010.

While having cameras that cover all angles of a scene has its advantages, there are some problems that may arise.

According to Wood, the cameras catch everything because they are wide angle, so sometimes the only way to get out of the shot is to hide behind a wall or even under the camera.

“We’ve had a couple of times where people tried to peek in and see what was going on and ended up being in the scene, so we had to work around that,” said Wood.

Wood, Ebrahimi and Fowler completed their undergrad at CSU Sacramento, San Jose State and CSU Northridge respectively, and — besides Fowler — were all Bay Area residents prior to attending CSU East Bay.

These students were featured on KRON4 recently and even have a website set up for those interested in Concealed 360.

“If you’re not watching the right content you’re going to miss out on the story,” said Wood.