POST
VFX REPORT
makeup and hair fixes while those departments are limited in their interactions with actors “There’s going to be a lot of those sort of sundry items,” he says.
BUILDING THE WALL But there are much bigger ways vfx can help during COVID restrictions. Virtual production, where environments and other vfx elements are created prior to production and played out around performers on LED walls with everything caught in camera, even sometimes down to final pixel, have come front of mind for producers. It’s a technique best known on movies like The Jungle Book and, most recently and extensively, on Disney’s The Mandalorian. The promise of being able to shoot entire productions in a controlled studio environment without the need to travel the world to various locations has obviously become a very attractive proposition. “Virtual production has become mainstream news
now,” says Chapman. “If you went back six months and you’d mentioned virtual production, people would have said ‘what do you mean by that?’” Virtual production isn’t entirely new, but COVID
has made people take notice. Asa Bailey, who runs On Set Facilities, has been facilitating virtual productions for some time and notes that business has boomed since COVID. “It’s one of those numbers where you think, was that a 300% increase, or is that a 500% increase? I’ve lost count.” And that’s down to necessity. “Nobody wants
to make a change unless they have to. The agencies and the production companies have to be forced to try it. And then when they tried it, they liked it.” Commercials are now shooting for “final pixel, real time compositing with Unreal Engine backgrounds and then right away those composite files are straight into the edit.” Right now, there aren’t too many facilities in
the UK set up to plug and play. On Set Facilities is one and Rebellion Studios in Oxford has launched its set up to outside clients with a series of demos taking place in recent weeks. But demand is now so high, others will come online. As with so much else, COVID has accelerated the interest in and use of virtual production and is pushing it into the mainstream probably years before it would have got there by itself.
BUILDERS NEEDED But the speed of growth means talent is lagging behind demand, says Bailey. “We need an army. We’ve got the cameraman, we’ve got the DoPs, what we need is virtual production developers.” Kevin Zemrowsky, technical director at Imaginary Pictures, points out that Unreal Engine maker, Epic
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televisual.com Autumn 2020
Top: Disney’s The Mandalorian
Bottom left: Cursed from Freefolk
Bottom right: Project Power from Framestore
Games “has identified the lack of skilled people and is funding training specifically aimed at this industry at a very high level - people with many years of film VFX experience with the hope that those people will then go out into the world and train more. The skills will develop quite quickly.” But right now to use virtual production at its
maximum capacity, “there’s a limited number of teams out there that are capable of creating high volumes of content in an efficient way for gaming engines, and particularly at that kind of final picture quality,” says Zemrowsky. “A lot of the people with game engine experience are pre-viz companies and they are not used to creating final picture quality. So there’s only one or two of the very biggest vfx houses that have the capacity to take on anything but the smallest of projects.” Virtual production also needs producers, directors
and DoPs to build up some familiarity with the technique before it can really take off. Brian Mitchell, head of Film Studios at Rebellion, says, “There are so many different aspects to it and variants of how you can use it. You need to be able to look at a script and identify what elements on that script really suit a virtual production set up or what needs to go on location.” For it to be successful, virtual production has to
be considered from the outset. “There’s a reason why projects like The Mandalorian have the look and aesthetic they have,” says Zemrowsky. “They’ve thought about this from the ground up – director, DoP, set design - everyone is aware of the content
“You need to be able to look at a script and identify what elements on that script really suit a virtual production set up”
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