PRODUCTION


VIRTUAL PRODUCTION: CINEMATOGRAPHY CRAFT


ZACH ALEXANDER


VIRTUAL PRODUCTION CONSULTANT co-President Lux Machina Consulting, an NEP Virtual Studios company


PROJECTS INCLUDE The Mandalorian, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Solo: A Star Wars Story, Oblivion.


The scale and budget of a virtual production solution is dependent on what you actually want to shoot on the day of production. Anything from previz, to storyboards, or even a script is helpful in defining the parameters of what our solution needs to achieve.


Primarily we are informed by the final creative intent. What do you want to see on the screen in the movie theatre? How close you want to be to that final objective when you yell cut on the set during any given shooting day on production?


Virtual production is a magic trick at the end of the day. If the camera looks at the setup in the wrong way the illusion will break. Getting the LED wall too much into focus will cause moiré. If you move the camera too quickly the inherent delay in the camera tracking and rendering systems will become more apparent.


The capture frame rate of the camera should be in sync with the playback frame rate of the LED screen. In addition, generating a LUT for the LED


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processors that takes into account the particular sensitivities of the camera and lens is something that we do.


A carefully maintained colour pipeline is crucial to the whole process. It very quickly becomes a blend of the technical and artistic and is one of the most complex part of these systems.


How to blend the CG world with the real one. Our brains will constantly look for things that justify that what we are seeing is real, so the scientific accuracy of a scene is less important than the visual and spatial cues that we can put into the content to make that line between the CG world and the real one very blurry.


Matching colour and lighting between the virtual elements and the physical sets and looking for places where you can hide the transition between virtual elements and the physical set is important, so controlling camera perspective and staging is key.


Camera tracking allows you to track the perspective of the scene in real time


and is crucial for essentially turning the LED wall into a window into a virtual world rather than a very high quality and animated painting of one.


Control interfaces are really important in these workflows. Whether they are things like touchscreen tablets, or physical buttons and knobs. Being able to customise interfaces that use terms and controls the DP and director are already familiar with is incredibly helpful for getting production teams familiar with these new tools.


CG lighting is usually controlled in the scene itself, there are ways to get lighting control data into and out of the scenes so a lighting console being controlled by the electrics department could be implemented as well. There is always a conversation to be had with the gaffer about how to best achieve the DP’s vision.


Use common sense. Using things like artificial snow with an LED wall can be challenging because the snowflakes might stick to the LED wall, revealing the fact that it is a solid wall of metal and plastic.


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