What is Virtual Production?

Over the years revolutionary technological advances have altered and expanded the trajectory of filmmaking. These advances include sound for film, colour negative stock, optical compositing, digital image capture, motion control, digital compositing, motion capture, virtual reality, and computer-generated imagery.

Virtual production is the next game changer.

You might be a cinematographer wanting to shoot real-time in-camera visual effects using LED wall technology. Or perhaps you’re an indie filmmaker planning a film and wanting to know how VP can help realise it on a modest budget.

You might be a producer who wants to leverage real-time rendering techniques as an alternative to a challenging location shoot. Maybe you’re a director about to embark on a performance capture animated TV series. Or a stunt person learning how stuntvis can make your stunts even more effective and safe.

Or perhaps you’re an indie filmmaker planning a film and wanting to know how VP can help realise it on a modest budget.

Virtual production removes the barriers between live production and visual effects, so that they can occur simultaneously instead of inline.

Visualisation, camera tracking, motion capture, LED live-action and green screen volumes are virtual production techniques that belong to the toolset of modern content creation.

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.