In late November we hosted a virtual workshop in our winter workshop series titled, "Scheduling and Logistics for Virtual Production", featuring a panel of our experienced virtual production professionals.
Above, from left to right: Daniel Mallek - Director of Content and Innovation, Kevin De Lucia - VFX Supervisor, Megan Hill - General Manager, Vū Nashville, Kristy Reed - Director of Sales.
3. Let Vū Help with the Unknown
While virtual production is gaining momentum in the industry, we still see so many people who haven’t experienced it firsthand. Kristy shared that teams are always concerned about what it’s going to look like. Here at Vū, we bring our team alongside yours to reassure you and suggest things we’ve learned from our experience shooting in the volume. When you book with us we lean on our VFX supervisors and Executive Producers to help guide you in the planning process. We love guiding our clients and they can really benefit from our expertise.
Our main goal is to be sure the client has a successful experience. We want you to love your time here and return to shoot with us again. Some clients love having that planning assistance from our team, and others don’t need much input. We always recommend getting your key team members into the space ahead of shooting because seeing it in person is much different than seeing it on the web.
4. Is Virtual Production Limitless?
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It’s been said many different ways that a blank page, or canvas, though filled with possibility, can be one of the scariest things. Virtual production is marketed as being this limitless potential where you can put anything you imagine on the screen. While this is true it’s important to have some direction before you begin shooting.
Kevin shared, “there is no set template for this stuff, or how many backgrounds you can do in a day, I think the biggest thing with virtual production is its problem solving, you know, it's trying to figure out are, what is your scope? What are you trying to do? How can you be prepared for those things coming into the production side?” It’s vital to have the environments chosen and optimized before shoot day. You should ask yourself questions like, can we adjust this color temperature? How do we need to tweak this exposure or change the lighting from twilight to daytime? When you know your goals going into the project, you’ll be much more successful.
5. Use Large Space to Plan Efficiently
The Mandalorian introduced us to using virtual production for sweeping vistas and the vastness of space. As a result so many initial use cases have been focused on grand elaborate digital placemaking. Every shoot is different and has different needs. Three of our Vū Studios, (Orlando, Nashville, and Las Vegas), all have volumes that are built in a "J" shape.
This gives us the very unique opportunity to have a flat space and a curved space. Megan Hill pointed out we can split the large LED stage into multiple sets and prebuild the scenes on a build/pre light day, “That way they are set up, we've pre lit we've seen the environments we know exactly (what they look like in camera), so you can walk in on the day of the shoot and then immediately turn and shoot into the next scene, which I think is a huge time saver.”
Megan continues, “I'm constantly looking at storyboards and working with the AD to help our clients be strategic with their shot lists.” There is power in utilizing several small stages to build out your practical art ahead of time so you can go from one set to the next without a lot of wait time. “Sometimes production companies will build two to three sets on one of our stages on their art build day to achieve this similar idea.”
When shooting virtual production, your “time and budget” shifts dramatically. When talking about time, Daniel had this to say, “we can switch between environments pretty rapidly, that's not a big time cost.” He went on to say that changing the camera setups, art builds and lighting is where you really start to see the timing come into play. This is why having multiple setups on a single stage can be very valuable.
Much of this comes down to the planning and logistics. We have seen a big difference in crews that have some volume experience, and take full advantage of pre-light/optimization/art build days. The teams that do this have a massive advantage on shoot days for everything to go off without a hitch.
Special thanks to our panelists for this workshop. If you have any questions about how to plan for virtual production or any upcoming projects that may be a good fit for ICVFX we’d love to be a resource for you. Let’s talk. Also be sure and watch the workshop for more insight and detailed discussion.
