PRODUCTION/POST
VIRTUAL PRODUCTION: HOW TO USE IT
Dimension, Sk y Studios and DNEG’s Vi r tual Production Innovation Project
VR headsets and green screens
with the game engine output composited in real-time are also being used for fully rendered pre-viz, blocking of camera moves or virtual scouting of locations.
Bait and switch Greenscreen is predominantly
used in live or live to tape virtual production at Butcher Bird Studios in Hollywood. According to director and co-founder Jason Milligan, this route is preferable when faced with the needs of live switching. “One of the downsides of working inside an LED volume is lag,” he explains. “When you switch from camera to camera, it’ll take milliseconds for that screen to catch up. Every time, you switch and then the environment catches up with you. When you’re working in a green screen and you have a three- camera setup running three different computers, all of those are in real time, so you can have the immediacy of a live-switched show with those environments wrapped around, with no lag.” The Butcher Bird approach
combines on-set data such as the camera lens metadata with Unreal Engine in Blackmagic Design’s
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televisual.com Summe 202 mmrr 2021
Ultimatte system. “We marry all those components inside the Ultimatte, bounce it out to our live switcher and it becomes a real live-action show,” says Milligan. “The last component that we layer on is lighting design. We can trigger any lighting changes within our DMX system and that really sells the illusion of those actors being in those environments. We’ve been playing with things like contact shadows [a facility in game engines to add visual depth to the rendering] and you honestly start not recognising where the virtual stuff stops and where the actual stuff starts. You have people thinking that computer-generated elements of the stage are actually practical elements. It’s very cool to be able to trick the eye and trick the viewer into thinking things that aren’t real, are real.”
Magic touch However, you need experts to create
that illusion. “The virtual set still needs to be built and as with any creative process the more time you give the virtual build team the better the virtual world they can produce,” says Waters.
It’s very cool to be able to trick the eye and trick the viewer
BUTCHER BIRD STUDIOS Jason Milligan
“We have built up a brilliant team of highly experienced designers who are dedicated to creating fantastic virtual worlds, as well as a team of engineers and craft talent who really understand how to help productions get the most out of this amazing technology and deliver extraordinary on-screen results.” “While you might not
have carpentry people, you still are going to
have computer designers within the world that are
fabricating what’s happening,” agrees Butcher Bird managing partner, Travis Stevens. “They’re still going to have to integrate with
the director of photography and get the lighting correct in both worlds so that it matches up. By building the environments in Unreal you can get the previz very close to what the actual shots are going to be. You can then start getting the stakeholders educated within the space, and a director of photography or director can go in and do their shot setups. They can do pre-production in a much more meticulous way that ends up saving time and money over the long run. You’re not guessing what it’s
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