VIRTUAL PRODUCTION | XR STAGE
You may have been hearing the term “Virtual Production” as of late, perhaps in hushed tones between takes on location or on set in one of GUM Studios’ traditional sound stages. Speculation on this new tech has escalated ever since Disney’s high profile series The Mandalorian debuted use of it as the core of the show’s production process earlier this year. With speculation rising that Virtual Production will eventually become the standard for how major motion pictures are shot - and potentially replacing green screens in the long term.
INTRODUCING VIRTUAL PRODUCTION
Put simply; Virtual Production unites decades of advances in software with major technical leaps in the hardware of LED surfaces. Virtual Production means shooting on a soundstage with a specially constructed curved LED Wall and ceiling that together form a behemoth known as The Volume. The Volume envelops the actors in a virtual display - like a giant curved TV screen - of any conceivable environment you load into it and lights the actors with the same lighting profile that’s illuminating the virtual objects seen on screen. The background could be the dunes of an extraterrestrial Tatooine or the interior of a lamplit Parisian restaurant; in The Volume, actors are lit with the ‘correct’ natural lighting appropriate to the virtual world around them, in the studio and on camera, because the screen isn’t just a screen - it is the lights.
PHOTO CREDIT: JACKIE ROMAN
POST PRODUCTION, MEET PRODUCTION
Virtual Production allows a director to say, “Great work, let’s do another take, but this time let’s try it at sunset.” An onhand Unreal tech rotates the virtual sun in the level editor, the light then propagates onto the environment and onto the actors via the LEDs and immediately - in real-time - the crew is ready for another take under entirely new circumstances. The same goes for holding ‘Magic Hour’ for longer than 15 minutes, sending the sun zooming across the sky to re-create an otherwise time-consuming timelapse, moving mountains and every other object in the environment until they look “just right,” or loading in multiple environments to film in over the course of a single shooting day.The impact this could have on performances, let alone production, seems hard to overstate. But one thing is certain, regardless of the artistic advantages, the practical benefits of Virtual Production are a game-changer in and of themselves for a production’s bottom line.
PHOTO CREDIT: UNREAL ENGINE.COM
THE VOLUME - MUCH MORE THAN A BACKDROP
An ordinary digital backdrop that would be unconvincing as soon you move the camera due to lack of a natural parallax between foreground and background elements (the shifting of background objects in response to a change in perspective that real-world environments exhibit.) With Virtual Production, the camera is tracked at all times, and the elements in the digital renderer carefully shift in response to the camera’s tilts. Powering all of this is the Unreal Engine, which hosts the 3D environment.
Famous as a platform for Triple-A videogame development including Fortnite, Epic Games’ Unreal Engine has, in recent years, become more multi-purpose, finding itself a leading element in just about every industry that demands real-time photorealism within its pipeline. As a result, Unreal has made its way into architecture, AI, automotive simulations, and now film production.The benefit for artists using Unreal is the environments that form their sets exist now within an immediately editable, relatively user-friendly program - meaning the abilities that were at one time strictly those of special FX artists are now available to the director and crew on set, and fortunately Unreal is a program that doesn’t totally require an advanced degree to understand.
PHOTO CREDIT: JACKIE ROMAN
MORE EFFECTIVE, MORE EFFICIENT, QUARANTINE FRIENDLY
The current COVID-19 pandemic has negatively impacted video production as an industry in particular. Social distancing requirements and location closures have caused unscheduled delays and uncertainty for productions around the globe. Never has there been a better time to go virtual and finish a production on time and in an environment you can control. While the world is on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic, clients of GUM Studios no longer need to be. Additionally, Virtual Production introduces the possibility of convincingly shooting on locations that are either too expensive or too impractical to manage ordinarily. With it shooting at The Pyramids, in Marrakesh, or in Times Square becomes not only possible but preferable. Virtual Production is beginning to look like the closest thing to teleportation technology as we’ve ever been able to offer, with one notable exception: wherever you decide to go, the studio, the catering - and the air conditioning - they’ll be coming with you.
PHOTO CREDIT: CLARISSA STEED