Filming with LED Walls and Unreal Engine

A Virtual Production workflow featuring LED screens allows filmmakers to capture dynamic photo-real digital landscapes and complex visual effects shots in-camera using real-time game engine technology.

The whole set is surrounded with LED video walls displaying backgrounds which are prepared in advance. There's even a screen above the actors to simulate Sky..

Camera movement is being tracked live to simulate the parallax effect which would happen naturally in conventional location filming.

The perspective of the 3D world displayed on the screens reacts accordingly to however you move the camera.

This is made possible by utilising the pioneering Unreal Game Engine, the world’s most open and advanced real-time 3D creation tool.

Infinite Location Possibilities
Powered by Real-Time Render Technology

Imagine being able to switch between the Iceland location to the desert location within the same day of shooting. Imagine having the ability to shoot a 10-hour dawn scene bathed in beautiful golden light.

A huge benefit of the virtual sets method is that the LED walls also provide lighting and often only smaller supplementary light sources are required. You get a natural light and more importantly something that is very hard to achieve using green screen, reflections of the environment.

Changes to the environment can be made in Unreal Engine live on set, enabling scenes to be edited in ways that would traditionally be extremely difficult or downright impossible. Changing positions of mountains or buildings for a particular camera angle or shot for example involves interactively picking it up and moving it to the desired location.

Scouting digital environments for shot placement is also possible.

Utilising VR to explore and review scenes Filmmakers can place themselves in a virtually accurate representation of the filming location to make better creative decisions, with the added ability to move that mountain or rock to a more agreeable position.

Lighting can be adjusted remotely from a device such as an iPad. allowing production teams and actors to see an accurate representation of the final image early on in the creative process. This allows for a very realistic, collaborative approach to filmmaking by immersing everybody into the scene.

You can allow your key creatives to all make decisions together so that the shots are captured entirely in camera, which allows for a better performance.

What are the advantages of Virtual Production?

Film-making nowadays is an incredibly complicated procedure featuring many moving parts on highly compressed production schedules.
The process is usually a linear affair that resembles an assembly line, encompassing creative development, pre-production, production, and post-production.

For filmmakers, this problem manifests itself as uncertainty. When a cinematographer has to guess the colour or intensity of their lighting to precisely match an unseen green screen element, or a director doesn’t exactly know what those mountains or spaceships actually look like, that’s uncertainty. It’s a process that feels incoherent, not resolving itself until all of the elements become finalised in post-production.

Virtual Production encourages a more iterative, nonlinear, and collaborative process. It empowers filmmakers to cooperate on visual details in the moment, not deferring all of these decisions to the edit.

Filmmakers and department heads can react to discoveries in the moment. Creative decisions about shots and sequences can be made much earlier in production, when the entire team is in attendance, rather than until the last minute of post production when the crews have long departed.

All of these efficiencies and increased image quality offer a trickle-down effect to more modest and tightly scheduled productions.

A real-time engine has the potential to dispose of many of the bottlenecks of budgeting, schedule, and development time which can limit smaller-scale productions from generating imagery on par with blockbusters.