POST
PRE VISUALISATION
“One of the things that we found interesting with
LED-based virtual production is that almost every shot has to have techvis,” says Norman Wang CEO & Co-Founder of Glassbox Technologies. “This is so you understand how your cameras are moving in relation to the volume, and in relation to the physical sets, especially if you’re using motion control and things like that on bigger shows. You need to know up front whether the shot is safe, and you need to be very careful about where you’re placing your camera. “If you know how everything is going to be
structured, if you know exactly what lenses you’re going to be shooting on, you don’t have to show up with like an entire truck’s worth of redundant equipment,” he continues. “The more detailed your previs becomes, the closer to the actual production environment it gets.”
Top left: Fluid Pictures’ previs work on Your Home Made Perfect
Top right: The XR stage at Savannah College of Art and Design, courtesy of disguise
TOOLS FOR THE TRADE There are moves to increase the accessibility of previs; Painting Practice develops V Tools, a system to simplify the complexity of Unreal Engine, while Niall Thompson, head of Cloud Solutions at disguise, says its newPreviz app allows cloud-connected collaborators to import both lighting and virtual cameras into an interactive 3D environment, map content to surfaces, and control/direct the session with a virtual camera. “The cinematographer can test how LED stage content will look from different angles using the 3D stage,” says Thompson. “The director can then see this stage in disguise Cloud, letting them review and approve all suggested shots collaboratively.” “There is still more ground to cover when we look
at tracking real-world lights and camera attributes,” says Ristich. “Digital doubles are becoming more commonplace and can connect to DMX systems to provide more control over stage production lighting, but the physical characteristics of lights are still only approximations by way of IES profiles and RTX blocker cards. Cameras can be faithfully represented with adequate preparation by using lens calibration cards and machine learning to determine lens intrinsics.”
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televisual.com Spring 2023
The Third Floor’s Cyclops application uses
ARKit augmented with GPS and Microsoft’s Spatial Anchoring system, bridging multiple tracking sources in real time, while Glassbox develops the virtual cinematography tool Dragonfly – used extensively in previsualisation due to its sophisticated optical simulation.
PITCHVIS AND BEYOND Dan May is branching out into what he calls artvis, a merging of previs and conceptual art, that can be also used for pitching. “We take everything that we know that’s going to have to be shot in the studios and the animation, we figure out the method beforehand, previs it and then do a story world in Unreal. Everyone can react to the sequence emotionally and tonally.” Mike Grieve, CCO of Bendac, predicts that it
will be possible to previs an entire production inside Unreal Engine then “enable flexible robotised onset shooting with minimal changes from the previs”. “The pre-requisites for this would be a fully 3D
mapped physical studio containing a LED volume or green/blue cyclorama with matched physical to virtual lighting,” he adds. “All assets, virtual and physical, would be tracked, all changes automatically stored, with the ability to re-render real-time VFX shot backgrounds at higher quality when required, and a simple ‘exit and return’ to post-production compositing, for shots that can only be done there, for example, anything with particles.” Recent work such as Lunar by director/VFX
filmmaker HaZ Dullul suggests the dawn of entire films being created using previs before receiving a project greenlight. Ristich agrees we’re at such a threshold, “but
the volume of data that can be generated from sophisticated previs requires a level of integration with the production that some projects cannot accomplish”, he adds. “As we move into the next generation of previsualisation, expect to see an explosion of the creative process as AI offers unprecedented speed of iteration and expression.”
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