The Virtual Production Revolution, Pt. 1

Pt. 1 - What is Virtual Production?

If you’ve seen the Disney+ Star Wars spin-off series The Mandalorian you may be aware that you’ve witnessed one of the first high-profile fruits of a revolution in film production. Despite appearances, this stunning-looking series was mostly shot in a small studio in California, its wide desert vistas and alien worlds the product of high-resolution LED screens and powerful gaming engines.

Racquet Studio, Eastbourne - June 2023

Made by Lucasfilm and released in 2019, The Mandalorian brought ‘virtual production’ properly to the fore of filmmakers’ thinking. But whether you’ve seen it or not, you will have seen many examples of this new process because it’s being used increasingly, to varying degrees, in television and film. The background you see in the drama on your television screen is often content displayed on an LED wall.

The pandemic played its part in this acceleration. The wider film world was recognising the benefits of VP just as Covid-19 hit, and content producers were urgently looking around for new, safer ways of working. Virtual production fitted the bill because so much of the work involved can be carried out remotely, limiting the number of people needed on-site.

“Virtual production makes it possible for the imaginary world to be brought closer to visible reality for those actually making the film. Compared with the long-established green-screen or chroma-key techniques that it replaces, virtual production leaves a lot less to the imagination for those on set . . .”

Virtual production is rapidly becoming the leading edge of filmmaking. While the concept has been around for some years (the ASC, along with other organisations, formed the Virtual Production Committee in 2009), today’s technology has provided the practical, accessible solutions which are fast bringing virtual production into the mainstream.

Virtual production makes it possible for the imaginary world to be brought closer to visible reality for those actually making the film. Compared with the long-established green-screen or chroma-key techniques that it replaces, virtual production leaves a lot less to the imagination for those on set. It makes for a more immediate and immersive scene, and greatly reduces the reliance on post-production where computer-generated imagery (CGI) and visual effects (VFX) are added later.

With green-screen techniques, actors would be filmed against an often-massive green cloth or painted background, with the scenic content overlaid later in post-production. Their powers of imagination would be called on to a great extent. ‘Green-screen fatigue’ became a thing, with cast and crews becoming quite literally dulled by the experience.

In contrast, virtual production technology uses state-of-the-art LED screens to display the scenic context – cityscapes, glaciers, hotel rooms, wooded glades, banqueting halls (you name it) – which are captured in-camera.

It offers many advantages, not least of which are about control – over budgets and timescales, but also over the quality of the creative output. There are performance benefits too. For actors, virtual production offers a very different experience from working in front of a green-screen, with the need to ‘imagine’ the world or characters that will be created later in post-production. Here, they can see their environments in real time and react and interact with them far more effectively.

But like any significant new methodology it requires new working practices, new skills, new ways of thinking, and new approaches to creative collaboration.