CRAFT VIRTUAL PRODUCTION: CINEMATOGRAPHY


PRODUCTION


PHILIP LANYON CSC


Virtual production gives the creativity back to the director and DP and I think it very much enhances the actor’s performance.


CREDITS TV projects include: Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, Frontier, Caught Films include: Devil in the Dark, Hiro


Lanyon used virtual production on the current season of Star Trek: Discovery (set pictured above)


Any light you put in the set affects the wall. You have to think about light hitting the LED and how it affects the image of the screen. Your black levels are affected by any light you put on there. It’s a very delicate dance.


You can create light sources on the wall, off-camera, we call them cards. You can put up a 12x12 white square beside an actor to light them and move that in real time. You can thus keep it out of frame as you pan the camera. You can change the shape, for example to create a big round reflection. Use black cards to create negative space.


In a virtual space you can get real reflections on the skin. If a comet goes by or you have a large mountain on one side and a sunset on the other, you see it on the face, and in the reflections on the eyeballs in real time. There’s a real authenticity and reality to it.


You don’t want the screen to be 100% sharp at any given time. You can have large swaths of moiré, especially in the highlights. A large format system can help with this. A slightly longer lens on LF lets you get a little closer to the subject, offering better rendering of facial features and effec- tively a shallower depth of focus. The latter creates that little bit of softness.


The focus falls off uniformly on an LED wall. On a physical set, the focus falls off the farther you are from camera, but in virtual production your focus will fall off at the screen and remain the same for the rest of your background. You have to be aware of that when you’re shooting, and make sure that it feels like one stage.


The tracking system always needs to see the markers on the camera. When it loses tracking, the wall doesn’t know where the camera is when it stops moving, so the shot is ruined. A lot of our time in pre production is spent figuring out where our camera is going to be and if we have enough tracking cameras looking at that area to make sure that it doesn’t lose tracking.


Use leading lines to trick the brain, such as creating a long pathway that continues into virtual space. Such techniques can take away from the fact that you’re shooting in a ‘round’ room.


We built practical lighting into the set whether it was a glowing rock, or a lit floor that was in an underwater conference room that physically lit the actors. Then we’d repeat a lot of that in virtual space so it looked like the same light source.


Composing in virtual space gives you creative freedom. If you have a camera angle that you specifically want that lines up a piece of practical set and an actor and you want the hill behind that actor to be two kilometres to the left, you can just move that in real time. You can literally move mountains.


Virtual production requires a mind shift and a time shift. All of these VFX shots would traditionally be at the end of the show. This process requires everybody to get on board, before you build the world in its entirety and have it ready to shoot.


Winter 2021 televisual.com 61


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