AV Magazine
Virtual Production (VP) is an evolution of established film and TV production methods with as many benefits as there are potential obstacles. With VP stages, or Volumes, shooting up all over the world filmmakers with experience of its tools are keen to share both pluses and pitfalls in order to keep virtual production on track.
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“VP means a lot of things to a lot of people. It’s a very broad umbrella,” says Callum MacMillan, virtual production supervisor, Dimension Studio. “At its core is a realtime games engine and the representation of 3D worlds on a giant LED wall to create the illusion of a real environment.”
In this sense VP is an extension of classic filmmaking techniques, like front and rear projection or green screen, in which actors are filmed against artificial backdrops for cost efficiency and greater control.
“It is the next evolution of VFX,” says John Rakish, president of the Location Managers Guild International. “What is radically different with virtual production is the introduction of an interactive light source that enables the cinematographer to capture final frames in-camera.”
The Mandalorian, for example, featured a central character with a reflective suit able to be photographed with light cast from surrounding LED panels.
VP also needs to be understood as a set of tools and processes that extend beyond the stage environment. Applications range from previz and remote scouting to character creation based on performance capture. Assets such as models, characters and 3D environments must be completely camera-ready before production starts.
“There’s no guesswork needed to ‘fix it in post’ when you can reframe a shot on set based on what you see through the lens,” says AJ Sciutto, director of virtual production at Magnopus, a virtual production company with bases in LA and St Albans. “This production value alone, if done right, is a key motivator.”
“The pandemic accelerated demand,” says Sciutto. “There was a lot of motivation to get back to work safely without sending hundreds of crew on location.”
The practical benefits of virtual
Even before Covid, VP was heading into the mainstream. That’s because the predictability of the virtual environment drives cost-savings from the bottom line.
“All the variables of shooting on location such as weather conditions or where craft services will actually be can be controlled,” says Sciutto.
“Simply not unloading and repacking kit each day saves time,” says Max Pavlov, CEO & co-founder, LEDunit, a VP stage in Riga, Latvia. “You can shoot at golden hour all day long if you want. There’s no need to stop and wait for perfect light or fret about paying overtime.”
Location based reshoots, which can account for 20 per cent (or more) of the final production cost of high budget films, calculates Deloitte, can be eliminated with careful pre-planning.
VFX costs on a high-budget sci-fi or fantasy film can be as high as 20 per cent of the total film budget, but shooting against an LED wall significantly reduces overheads for compositing and rotoscoping.
“With games engines we can put all the individual aspects of a linear pipe into one environment to co-exist at the same time,” explains Ed Thomas, head of VP, Dimension. “Potentially you have production design, lighting, layout modelling and animation all happening at the same time in one environment.”
VP stages have found a natural home for filmmakers wanting to bring fantasy story worlds to the screen but the technology is equally applicable “from a spaceship to a pack shot,” says DoP and camera operator, Richard Dunton.
Which content works best?
Virtual production opens up opportunities to shoot in areas which are difficult to travel to, or simply downtown in a city where permits would be cost prohibitive. Smaller VFX teams can use photogrammetry and Lidar scans to rebuild those locations in a studio.
Scenes of conversations in moving cars, walk and talks, “things you would spend a lot of money to shoot on location can be shot virtually at the same quality,” says Sciutto.
Another advantage is the benefit it gives to actors able to key their performance to locations they can see rather than to invisible creatures or environments requiring greater leaps of the imagination.
“The ability for actors to play within true to reality environments is the real focus of virtual production,” says Philipp Klausing, MD at Dark Ways which just produced Netflix period drama 1899 at a virtual stage in Berlin. “We are recording performances not the background.”
VP is not a silver bullet
For all its advantages VP does not make creative or commercial sense for every production.
When director Denis Villeneuve invited The Mandalorian cinematographer, Grieg Fraser to photograph Dune it was not to tap Fraser’s virtually unique VP expertise but the gritty realism he brought to films like Zero Dark Thirty.
Both Fraser and Villeneuve wanted audiences to feel the heat and sand of a desert by shooting in the Middle East.
“VP is not a silver bullet,” says Sciutto. “There are a lot of people who are trying to force things into a VP workflow. There is absolutely a tactility to locations you don’t get inside a volume.”
Photographing LED screens in close-up can result in problematic visual artefacts which is why shots in a volume tend to have their background’s blurred with a shallow depth of field.
Framestore’s head of episodic, James Whitlam advises that a dialogue-heavy drama to be filmed in tight close ups would be too expensive on a virtual stage but that “a volume is perfect for recurring scenes across multiple seasons where you can achieve economies of scale.”
Game of Thrones sequel House of the Dragon for instance was shot entirely on a Warner Bros’ Volume at Leavesden.
Shooting in a volume is not all or nothing either. Stages composed of modular and portable LED panels can be built to spec.
“A scene set on board a train for example might only need enough panels to cover the windows to give your interior’s realistic reflections,” says Chris Hunt, CFO at LED specialist, Brompton Technology.
The Mandalorian and 1899 made use of regular sound stages alongside a volume. This can be to accelerate schedules (shooting different scenes simultaneously), or for aesthetic reasons. “Shooting an entire show in a volume can look too sterile” says Sciutto.
Physical builds and props on the volume stage need to merge convincingly with the CG backdrop, putting additional pressure on production design.
“The whole LED image in camera should transition seamlessly between floor, ceiling and wall of the volume,” he says. “Most LEDs are at 90-degree angles to the stage and require some painted clean-up in post. Placing physical sets, such as columns, that repeat seamlessly into the wall works really well because the camera and your eye can fix on content that is lit in the real world.”
Physical set and virtual world blending
Nor are volume stages necessarily cheap. Depending on the project scope it can require additional labour to create VFX. The biggest cost are LED panels, originally built for DooH and currently expensive rental items.
“Everything is bespoke and there’s no assembly line methodology for putting together a volume stage,” says Scuitto.
For all the incredible photoreal quality of games engines like Unreal, the software is not capable yet of rendering some computer graphics in the highest quality. Elements like human background characters, rainforest foliage and waterfall simulations are picked out as troublesome.
“There are many interlocking parts to VP which can create cascading problems if one element is misjudged or overlooked,” says Grieg Fraser, director of virtual and adaptive production at the Entertainment Technology Centre in LA.
“For example, the idea that the LED screens themselves can illuminate the actors and set is broadly true, but this masks a maze of complications and decisions that the cinematographer and gaffer have to master.”
Technology aside, the biggest impact of virtual production is the shake-up it means to conventional filming. New production roles and lines of decision making need to be agreed and understood.
The Virtual Art Department (VAD) for instance, led by the VAD supervisor will include leads for creating lighting and assets within the virtual world. Their work needs to interface with a gaffer and the production designer (who works across both real and virtual sets). The ultimate responsibility for the image composition rests with the DP and director.
“There is a well-established hierarchy on a normal set. You plug in virtual production and this changes,” says James Whitlam, MD, Episodic, Framestore. “On 1899 we got into a flow where we were not treading on each other’s toes but we’d have to do ten of these jobs to really know whether this is a template that works.”
Various bodies are working to agree job descriptions and pay rates. A new lexicon for creating in Virtual Production is being developed by organisations including Netflix, SMPTE, disguise and VES.
Education required
One SMPTE initiative aims to create a library of digital assets for producers to quickly license and download. That’s becoming increasingly urgent in order to slash the time in pre-production needed to build virtual worlds, particularly for producers needing to convince investors to finance the production.
“I am looking for an independent library of location-based data and a unified technology standard that will enable producers working anywhere to pick and choose assets and download them, with some adjustment, ready to play in any volume,” says Klausing.
Beyond that there are numerous education initiatives to get experienced filmmakers and graduates alike hands-on with VP stages.
“Just as when the industry went from shooting film to digital, some directors and DoPs need convincing (about VP),” says Pavlov. “But when they try it, they understand how easy it is.”
VFX producer-turned-director, Paul Franklin is a convert. “Once in a digital world your creativity is infinitely malleable. For me, virtual production is a way of taking what I would have done as a VFX artist and bringing it live on to the set.”
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