PRODUCTION/POST
VIRTUAL PRODUCTION
Virtual production became a hot topic as lockdowns hit and location shooting got tough. And the technology, techniques and possibilities of virtual production have moved on at a dizzying pace over the past year with facilities springing up throughout the UK. Jon Creamer reports
he restrictions placed on productions of all shapes and sizes during the pandemic have led teams to find
innovative ways of communicating, planning and shooting. Necessity is the mother of invention. Virtual production, although not
a new concept in March 2020, has certainly caught the eye of producers across the board with its promise of bringing the location to the production team rather than the other way around.
The big build Before the pandemic, virtual
production stages were few and far between in the UK - VP pioneer On Set Facilities had its set up and games developer Rebellion Studios in Oxford launched its stages to film and TV clients in the early part of 2020. Since then, with the wind of
pandemic filming restrictions behind them, more and more have come online. Warner Bros Leavesden has just announced its V Stage that will have Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon as its first customer. ARRI has recently opened a new
mixed reality studio in the UK with an LED volume comprising 343 square metres of LED wall in Uxbridge, West London. Garden Studios, a new creative hub including three sound stages and a VP stage in Park Royal, West London opened in the midst of the pandemic. Bild Studios is to open its newly-built Mars Volume this summer, also in West London. Dimension Studios is finalising plans for permanent virtual production stages in the UK and North America. 80Six has its semi-permanent stage in Slough and film and TV production facility, The Vectar Project, has launched two new virtual studios at its base in Stockport. Expect more to follow. The tech and the techniques
behind virtual production have been moving fast too. “Virtual production has been pushing forwards on multiple fronts,” says DNEG Creative Director, Paul Franklin, whose company recently announced a virtual production tie up with Dimension. “The real time tools have become significantly more
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televisual.com Summer 2021
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sophisticated both in terms of their interfaces and the visual results that they can generate. Unreal Engine 5 raises the bar for photorealism and sophistication. At the same time Nvidia has released new graphics cards that allow even more complex graphics to be rendered in real time and the LED manufacturers are continually giving us access to brighter and sharper images.” David Bajt, co-founder of Bild
Studios, says the pandemic has “definitely accelerated where the industry was heading” with virtual production, due to travel restrictions and the relatively controllable environment of a stage, but also it’s down to the “backlog of production that needs to be worked through, with fairly limited resources available. The traditional film production process is, give or take, at peak efficiency. Virtual production introduces a whole new set of tools that enables you to increase content yield and increase overall efficiency with fewer resources.”
Dimension’s Head of Real-Time and
Virtual Production, Ed Thomas, says the pandemic “has certainly sped up the adoption of real time engines as it cuts down the dependencies on large teams to initially create content to get in front of the directors. It has also introduced live online collaborative workflows that couldn’t exist otherwise.”
High def ini t ions But how you view the speed of
adoption of virtual production does to an extent depend on how you define the term. It is nebulous and constantly shifting. “The definition of virtual production changes dramatically depending on who you talk to and what their experience is. Some people will say virtual production has been around for many years, however their definition will be completely different to someone who has say, The Mandalorian, in mind,” says Rowan Pitts, co-founder of Bild Studios. Pete Jopling, Executive VFX
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