Final Pixel Academy’s Post

Transcript

Unreal Engine is the most powerful 3D content tool on the planet. It allows us to create realistic environments and place our actors in a virtual set. Virtual production allows you to do these incredible real time composites live onstage without using green screen. We create photoreal 3D models and then we play them on a giant curved LED wall. It renders in real time, which means there is no lag, no delay. You put your 3D model on screen in front of the camera and you can move around in that environment and all of the lighting reacts to changes in our scene. When the camera moves in 3D space, the image on the wall also moves in 3D and the perspective changes, and that's what creates incredibly realistic illusion. From a DPS perspective, lighting, I get to see natural light, natural colour, everything that's affecting the environment. Actually seeing that on telling themselves. So much flexibility for a director or a director of photography to make adjustments. We want to change the time of day, or if we want to light certain parts of the scene differently, we can do that immediately without having to wait for it to render the real time lighting changes that occur in camera. It's so much more organic compared to a green screen. Virtual production is bringing a whole new department to the film set. It's the software developers, the programmers, as well as a 3D modelers and the technical artists. One of the real tricks to virtual production is the ability to blend a physical set with a virtual set. You have to be able to create a believable, practical foreground set that merges seamlessly with the 3D image, the 3D environment on the wall. Awesome. This is a very powerful medium for actors because unlike green screen, they can see the environment that they're in and that seems to really elevate their performance. In the second we arrived on set you can actually see ohh this is the tone of the piece. You get to see the effects straight away as a performer. We took previous projects from our portfolio to see if we could recreate them in virtual production and solve some problems for our clients. It turns out the 3D modeling process is just as good as filming in a real location. And what's great about the 3D modeling process is that clients can decide exactly what they want in the set in advance of the shoot. Without having to spend weeks doing location searches, you can specify exactly what you want, and that's an incredibly powerful part of virtual production. The really great advantage is having onset final pixel shots so that when you've got it and you go into the edit, it's done. The technology is really exciting. So many advances in film and TV have converged at the same point to really bring the magic back into filmmaking. As a filmmaker, virtual production is giving us a whole new set of tools with which we can push back the boundaries of film and television, and that's incredibly exciting.