How we made a Comedy Series for the BBC using Virtual Production

[Music] this video is a brief look at how we used virtual production to make a comedy series for the bbc a lot of the series was made in this studio it took us a long time to get to this stage but now we can get a virtual set to look pretty realistic with real and unreal objects combined in one scene to the point where you start to question which bits are real like the walls definitely not the floor but how is that virtual oil barrel reflecting the real lamp in jack's hand here when we started out we didn't know how any of this stuff worked but we had a sketch comedy to make which needed lots of locations and we were filming at a time when lots of locations weren't open due to a pandemic so there was this buzz about the mandalorian which used large led panels to generate backgrounds with unreal engine providing the images the clever thing being that the backgrounds attract to the camera so the perspective is right whatever angle you're shooting at so we wanted to see if we could use those techniques to save shooting on location but we had nowhere near the budget of the mandalorian hey everybody so youtube was our constant companion for a couple of months while we looked at videos and tutorials from a few clever and generous people who are happy to share their knowledge with the rest of us follow me through basketball court and i show you after researching the led screen thing where most of the videos seem to end with people walking away to reveal it was all in the studio we realized it wasn't going to work for us we couldn't afford it and besides we needed virtual floors and virtual props and locations other than deserts no we were definitely going to use green screen so we bootcamped an imac as unreal works better on a windows pc but at this stage we didn't want to buy one bought a vive tracker and two base stations and worked out that you didn't need a headset if you had the courage to change the config files in the steamvr app we put the vive tracker onto a c300 camera connected the pictures into the mac via an old black magic device and after about a week we could put a bit of coloured paper on the wall and see through it into a cool if a little jerky 3d world beyond [Music] somehow this was enough to convince us and bbc wales that we could make a series using this technique [Music] so then we found a studio space put a green screen in bought a proper pc a secondhand ursa mini pro and a deck link card and then spent another month just testing and testing until we could understand 3d space a bit more and just learn the concepts behind the way unreal engine works while also writing scripts for the sketch comedy show [Music] by now we could reliably get a camera in the unreal world to move about in sympathy with the real camera [Music] we bought sets from the unreal marketplace and often changed them to get them to suit the locations we needed [Music] it took us ages to work out that even though everything might look okay we can get someone walking on a virtual floor but if you don't know how high the camera is above the floor you can get things very wrong for instance this looks okay now but walk back down the corridor and we have a very tiny jack but move the virtual floor down a little and now this looks more realistic so we did all this testing and the field is just changing so rapidly that lots of things which have come out since weren't available then like live link to get the tracking data from the vive into unreal more easily and free lens calibration software to get the real and unreal cameras matching better and these cool aruco tag things to help work out how high you are above the floor because as i said it's really important to get the height of the floor right so how do we get the virtual and real worlds on screen together well you can use obs which is free and which actually has a really good chroma keyer so you get a feed of your real camera put it over your virtual camera take away the green leaving you a guide shot which you can put on a monitor in the studio where everyone can see what the composite scene looks like so we have a guide or comb shot which we record but we also have the clean unreal background recorded too and the clean camera footage so then post-production is quite straightforward sync up the comp and the two cleans keep them together in the timeline and just look at the guide while you do the rough cut then do the complex layering work on just the shots you need giving you time to work on shadows better chroma keying and grading so we were up and running want to be in a prison or a medieval village or a bar all in the same day virtual production makes it possible and because you're not traveling between locations you can get through so much more and your imagination can be freed from logistics you can be more confident that you'll be able to set your sketches anywhere you like but this is a world of smoke and mirrors so we worked round the limitations of the system we had for instance the vive tracker is really designed for virtual reality gaming and so it's great to get you started but if you want to do reliable smooth moves and vision you're probably going to use a different system so for instance this clever live studio setup uses a system like mosis which is really great and really accurate and really expensive when we moved our camera envision it was usually unusable too jerky to be used in a real situation but most of the time you can survive in the world of sketches without moving the camera envision so this wasn't such a massive limitation what we wanted was to be able to reposition the camera to get to the next shot and know confidently that our background had moved in the same perspective as the real camera and now back to the aruco markers which are a bit of a game changer to help you set the floor height and position your camera in a virtual set you just place one roughly where you want to film have a matching aruco in the unreal set do a quick grab of the image and then the virtual set just jumps into place [Music] what's great about green screen too is that you can use a simple green cloth or green board to give your actors a real object to work with that they can rest papers on or the edge of a doorway they can walk past so use a smaller aruco marker on this bit of green set have a marker in the virtual scene in the right place and then the bar is the right height and the right angle to shoot a sketch in a bar without having to build the bar that can be lent on [Music] since we finished the show which you can see on bbc iplayer we've been working on improving tracking with vives which we have working pretty well now and we bought an intel real sensor tracker which in some cases gives us smoother moves than the vive so we can now move the camera in vision better and get pretty good results with a relatively inexpensive kit which is the end of the market we're in we've also done lots more work on improving lighting and keying and getting the output of the virtual cameras looking more filmic it's an exciting time to be working in this field and the great thing is for now at least a lot of the software unreal engine in particular is free so that's how a small company in wales made a comedy series for the bbc using virtual production [Music] you

Channel: Phillip Moss

Views: 183,185

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Id: DQT0Qy856mA

Length: 8min 12sec (492 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 28 2022