Virtual Production Workflows & Insights

good morning from los angeles california where this morning the sun came out and is poking through cloudy skies that are laced with a lot of smoke this is remote control i'm jim chavin from ais this morning i'm joined by our chairman from google buzz hayes buzz good morning good morning jim welcome we look like we're in different locations we're actually in the same studio location but we're practicing safe production distancing here as we present our uh remote control conference today from glendale we are thrilled to see people joining us from um brazil and london and puerto rico and mexico and san francisco and fort collins colorado and new mexico and boston and new york so and london welcome all we're absolutely thrilled that you could join us it's great that we've got people from all over the planet at this point joining us and we'd like to make this an interactive session so during the conference there's a chat that you see on the screen and we'd love for you to submit questions uh as they come to mind and we will address those questions at the end of the presentations we'll have a proper q a period after that so please enter your questions in the chat as you think of those and we'll get to as many as we can and then also we have a couple of polls that we wanted to put out there to talk to you about to get some opinions on a couple of key subjects so when you see the polls on your screen please feel free to contribute and we will tabulate those results and talk about that after one of the questions that we're going to ask this morning and and i'll ask you buzz in the course of your career um have you ever seen anything disrupt your career like this has no nothing at all um this has been an interesting time but it's also a time for us to think about how we can actually get back together creatively even if we can't get back together physically and i think it's a really interesting opportunity uh to rethink a little bit about the process we've been using the same process for making movies and tv shows for a very very long time and some of it is worth actually reevaluating so if nothing else we can come out of this with a a newer and better approach perhaps uh you work at google cloud you're the head of media and entertainment you're the global lead for media entertainment space um how busy are you during this period what's happening at google quite busy you know and the main thing we're trying to focus on initially was to get people back to work remotely but then beyond that it's really figuring out new ways for people to feel like they're collaborating because we deal with a creative medium and in this creative medium it really requires lots of decision making all day long we used to be able to tug on someone's shirt sleeve and say hey what if we tried this or if we moved the light over there or set the camera over here and the times are different now so we have to find better ways to collaborate than just video conferences we have to find better ways for people to feel like they're actually back in collaboration mode so that's probably one of the biggest challenges that we're dealing with right now at google we've got uh greetings from malaysia we have uh bollywood someone checking in from mumbai uh ann arbor michigan good morning michigan um but we've got uh four weeks of of conference sessions rather than doing an entire day we decided to make these bite-sized chunks and 90-minute sections beginning today next thursday we'll have um a group from ilm bebop tech dave ward ceo of pap fabric and uh eric iverson who's the new cto of amazon web services will be joining us so um and then uh the team from discovery networks on how they migrated their channels uh creatively up into the cloud that'll be next thursday so we've got four thursdays of content and uh today we're going to be talking about matt workman and the producer skills so it's going to be fun as people move in here and minneapolis is here this morning good morning and washington state i hope uh we see the sun this morning i hope you can see the sun up in washington uh i know that the whole west coast has been um you know covered in in in the fog of an orange smoke so our hearts with you guys up the coast um fantastic los angeles is checking in miami good morning miami thrilled that you could well you guys you guys are underwater welcome to the calamity remote control uh podcast well fantastic it's great sacramento is here this morning uh mumbai india fantastic you know um yeah we would typically uh host this event at paramount studios or disney or or your campus at google so it's kind of cool to be bringing everybody together here uh from canada's checking in houston texas y'all hey texas hey argentina that's really nice um anyway it's great to have you this is about a 90-minute program here today we're going to switch to boston live and then we're going to go to vancouver where christina lee storm is working on a movie they start principal production in a couple of weeks up in canada so she'll give us an idea of how things are moving along in the canadian production community and um and we'll go from there so everybody's coming in it's madrid spain las vegas norway oh fantastic uh this is just just terrific we are the world this morning we're just thrilled so uh you can go join us please remember uh we have a chat going and if you have questions during the presentation please enter them in the chat we'd be happy to answer those in the q and a session but welcome from all over the country yeah toronto checking in hey toronto is it cool up there yet is it turning cold are the leaves turning um culver city hello culver city so um yeah fantastic and uh we this new platform from meet mo has been developed by one of our member companies we wanted to do some things that we didn't think were quite possible with zoom and so uh today we just wanted to get the basic show done for you but beginning next thursday we'll start rolling out some really cool features that this uh that this platform can do uh because all of us work in the creative space and we need good pictures and we want some flexibility uh we're trying to develop this platform for everybody so you can see and experience and look at things that you probably wouldn't be able to see on a zoom call so um terrific and buzz you uh look like you're right in front of the control room there yes indeed right behind me is uh control central here and uh that's where all the magic is happening today um as we bring in our guests from various parts of the of the north american continent today and um so uh we we have a uh amazing team that's working all around us here in a very safe socially distanced production environment which is something that we'll also be talking about uh over the course of the next four weeks to walk onto the stage yesterday and see actual human beings everybody in masks everybody at a distance but it was so nice to walk into a workspace and see other human beings smiling back over their masks the other the other point about our production team is they're working on this show for us today and then they are going to work on the emmys telecast this weekend my old job so uh thank you to the great team that are behind the scenes producing our show and if you watch the emmys this weekend you'll see them behind the scenes there making it look great for television for everybody again for the folks that are just joining um welcome we've got folks coming in from all over the world and uh as i mentioned we also have a couple of polls that we're going to be posting on the uh the presentation screen here later on so we'd love to get your feedback on these poll questions we have two of them today and also as you have questions again uh during the presentations please enter them in the chat and we'll select a few questions for the q a period afterwards to cover with our presenters so again really appreciate all of you being here today and we hope you enjoy uh our remote control conference and uh we'd love to hear uh how you think it's going so please keep in touch in the chat we're yeah we're all we're learning this together uh we started this conversation several months ago hello uh hello indonesia hi germany uh guten tag uh to our friends in germany welcome in indonesia that's terrific new york city good morning big apple i understand that you could see the smoke from california up in new york yesterday which is kind of horrifying um but um anyway uh amsterdam fantastic france uh columbia man we could we could create uh we should get the music from we are the world and uh do a sing along uh buzz if the uh if the if the production community can get back to work um do you think uh what's happening right now is forever going to change the way all of us create content i do uh in some sense it's going to change how we collaborate as teams and it will certainly change certain aspects of production you know when you think about post-production it's a fairly isolated experience in a lot of cases you've got editorial going on and post-production and other aspects that have happened with a much smaller crew you really have the whole brain trust together during production and that's the part that's really going to change the most fundamentally at least now and we'll see how that changes but with new production technologies like virtual production which we'll be talking about today that's really going to fundamentally transf uh transform how we make movies and uh it'll be a question of you know when people can actually get back together on set and make that all work but we're we're making incredible strides in that and you'll find out about a lot of these great solutions starting today well the the the good news is and we're hearing this from everybody is that the minute we're kind of through this and we'll be talking about you'll be actually seeing how they're working on set here uh at our second producer's guild session today but the pent-up demand for production is so big that if we can get if we can figure out and get everybody back into a work environment uh there's going to be a lot of work because a lot of a lot of shows have got to be finished because all these services uh have got billions of viewers that are paying subscription fees and want to see uh great content so that's the good news for us great well shall we get started we shall we are just about a minute away thanks for joining us stand by and we'll start here very shortly [Music] good morning everybody welcome my name is buzz hayes i'm from google and i'm the chairman of the advanced imaging society uh for those of you who are familiar with the advanced imaging society we've been having a fall conference for the past number of years in different locations we uh started it uh at paramount pictures and we had the last two years at google but this is a different time and 2020 is not your average fall conference so uh the industry itself is changing and the ais is changing to meet that so i'd like to welcome all of you to remote control it's a series of 90-minute conversations over the next four weeks on thursdays that will help us understand how we can best get back to work and most importantly how we can get back to collaborating creatively as we're making content um so i hope you bear with us through our technical challenges we're doing some uh pretty groundbreaking things here in terms of being able to present uh from various parts of the world and uh we feel very strongly that it's part of our mission to really keep all of us connected so throughout the course of the next four thursdays uh encourage you to tune in and to ask questions in the chat and and participate in our polls and we can keep this as an interactive conference as possible so one benefit of being remote is that today we have people joining us from all over the place we've got a guest from boston massachusetts from the san francisco bay area from vancouver canada from london england the eu new zealand and bollywood and the sessions are going to be recorded so you can view and share them later and we encourage you to do so please engage with us again via the chat and um one of the first things we wanted to do was put a poll up on the screen for you and the poll is related to how how soon do you think movie theaters will be open for first run releases in all the major u.s markets including new york and la there's a lot of conversation about that but we're really curious about your opinion on that so please chime in on the poll when you see it on the screen and you have some options in the poll to select so we will share the answers from those polls a little bit later this morning i'd also like to take this opportunity to thank our sponsors uh gary radburn and matt allard at dell rick champagne at nvidia uh the producers guild of america the visual effects society of america the american society of cinematographers and computer graphics world and we'd also like to thank meetmo our conference platform that we're using here today welcome to the meetmo.io platform as jim mentioned we'll be starting to explore some of those features uh throughout this conference and we'll be showing some very cool things on the this remote collaboration platform over the next four weeks so thank you very much to the meet mo production team here now today we're going to have a couple of presentations the first is going to be by matt workman who's joining us virtually from potentially the coolest home office you've ever seen he'll be talking about virtual production on the budget and then our second session will be from the producers guild of america that will be a producer's view on virtual production techniques capabilities planning and budgeting so without further ado let's get started with today's program i'd like to introduce matt workman who for many of you needs no introduction he's had an illustrious career in computer graphics he started his career making music videos for the likes of uh justin bieber and 50 cent and diddy for mtv he's done a number of commercials that i'm sure you've all seen that have been for various large companies including facebook google bmw and l'oreal and he specializes in technical cinematography pre-visualization motion control and heavy v effects so without further ado i would like to introduce matt make sure that during his presentation you're entering your questions in the chat and we will uh pick up that q a afterwards so welcome from boston massachusetts matt how are you this morning pretty good thanks for having me that's great well we're really pleased to be here um so uh you've got a few things to show us today and um uh feel free to to uh embellish it i think we have a fairly technical crowd here so uh you can you can dig deep on this one all right but we really appreciate your being here with us and um uh i hope everyone enjoys this and again please enter your questions in the chat and we'll get to those in a little bit so uh without further ado matt take it away awesome so welcome to my virtual studio uh today i'm going to be doing a couple demos of the work that i do here that is on the indie side of the spectrum although it is a little bit to spin it up it is something that i think most people could at least work towards and do possibly in their smaller studio or their house so the first thing we're going to be looking at is why i have this green screen down here we're going to be looking at some mixed reality virtual production so that means using live action footage from the camera that i am filming this with uh and matching that to a live rendered 3d world in unreal engine and putting those together so it's kind of like a fancy 3d weather report but i use my electronic drum so i'll show you how i do the camera tracking for that and a behind the scenes of what that looks like to set up after that i'm going to be getting back into more of my traditional cinematography roots and using tools like the nodo inertia wheels here normally used to control gimbals or remote heads on cranes and this sort of hybrid camera that's behind me and we'll be doing a little bit of handheld camera work and essentially uh filming in a completely virtual world like i would film in the real world if we were on a live action set so those are the two things i'm going to cover in this presentation and looking forward to sharing that with you hey what's up my name is matt workman and welcome to my virtual production studio we're going to do two demos today i'm going to show you my mixed reality setup where i use a real world camera and i film myself on a green screen on a drum set and we do some pretty cool interactive lighting and 3d backgrounds with everything 3d tracked so excited to show that and we're also going to film something completely in a virtual world but we're going to be using a virtual handheld camera a virtual geared head and a bunch of other cool hardware that makes filming in a virtual world more like filming in the real world so let's start with a quick tour of all the equipment here uh for mixed reality you need a real camera and a real lens and i'm using the blackmagic design ursa mini pro 4.6 k g2 and i'm using a standard canon ef 35 millimeter prime here so this is dslr equipment this is still fairly indie not expensive pl lenses uh just yet on the top of this camera what makes this a virtual production setup is that i'm using something called the vanishing point vector system and what you'll see of that right now is this little sensor on top of the camera and what that allows me to do is track the position and rotation of the real world camera and send that back into unreal engine so that's the most important part of making this a virtual production setup to my right here is my camera cart made by innovative this is normally a film industry card for bringing on set and that's how i have this set up that's the way that my mind still works my main workstation here is an hp z8 with a quadro rtx 8000 in it so pretty much pretty top of the line for um getting real-time performance out of unreal engine and i have a 4k monitor here also hpz and this is somewhat special if you're not from the film industry or unique this is an atomos sumo 19 hdr monitor slash recorder so i can actually hit record on this which we'll do shortly and it will record into prores 1080 uh whatever is on the screen so that allows me to record all this cg real-time stuff like it's just footage there's no rendering frames or anything like that i really like these type of live recording workflows so let's take a look at the vector tracking system right now you'll see on my computer i have the vector system online right now where it's on the monitor and basically now if i pan and tilt the camera like this at the right side of the screen you can see a virtual representation of the camera moving around and so if i tilt down you see that it tilts down if i uh pan left and right you'll see that that's being reflected so that is essentially primarily doing our camera tracking and the vector system is probably the best indie system out there and is very easy to use compared to some of the uh other techniques of doing camera tracking so here we are in unreal engine here this is a little scene that i built pretty simple uh with some custom midi integration and uh a future dmx stuff but uh it's a standard 3d scene that i lit myself and what makes this a virtual production scene is that we have this right here so i'm going to hit g and you'll see that we have a 3d camera here and that's what that is and a view of the actual real world camera with it composited over the uh 3d camera here and so if i pan the camera back and forth uh you can see that we are tracking the real world camera and then the 3d camera does the same exact same thing and we can posit those together and that is what's essential for a virtual production setup like this so what i'm going to do next is i'm going to send the composite of this to my recording monitor so that i can work on this 3d scene while recording and viewing through the camera over here so i'm going to hit play like this which full screens it which is fine actually but i'm going to hit capture and now i'm sending that video composite live to this monitor here so again if i move it back and forth there's a bit of a delay on that one it will be on that monitor itself so i'm on the drum set now awesome and what i'm going to do is hit record so that we can hear the audio at the same time and this is how i make these videos so let's record and i'm recording on the drum set now this records the drum set audio and that monitor is recording the composite so i'm going to hit the drum for sync excellent so what you'll see is when i hit different drums different 3d objects happen and i'm calling this setup neon bars because that's basically what pops up so if i hit the symbol here you'll actually see that we have a foreground object so i'll do it again and it is based on how hard i hit the symbol so we have which drum we hit where you hit it sometimes and also how hard you hit the drum like that so i'm not hearing it i'm not going to do an actual drum demo i'll show you what it looks like and because i don't have someone at the actual camera i can't show you the pending and tilting but i'll show you a clip of what it looks like when you're handheld and it's all put together [Music] so that's what it looks like when you have someone operating the camera handheld and you play something and you have all this working at once it's pretty cool the last thing that i can show you is that if i turn on this light that's behind me that's putting white light on me right now eventually i'm going to connect that to unreal engine and that is going to be able to change color and react based on however i deem fit currently i can just do a simple loop so i'll turn that on real quick okay so now that light which is an aperture p300c so an unreleased led panel coming out very soon very affordable for the indie filmmaking market that has full rgb color and programmability i don't think that's how you say that but we're gonna go with it and we're gonna soon be trying to control it through dmx with unreal engine so uh what i have in my virtual scene is a pink light kind of spinning in circles that you should be able to see and it's very asynchronously set up to make it look like um it is basically being reinforced by this real world light here to make this illusion a little bit stronger so [Music] like that this isn't a drumming workshop though however so that's gonna wrap it up for the demo of the mixed reality again we have our real world camera being tracked it's 3d position that's all making its way back into unreal engine we have a 3d scene that is then reacting to in this case the drums that i'm playing with a real world light attempting to match the lighting in the virtual world put together so that's a fairly simple setup but i'm going to keep expanding on this mixed reality setup and making videos this project again is called drummer xr hello and welcome to the second part of this demo i've reconfigured my workstation and now we're going to film something completely in a virtual world using some traditional filmmaking tools and techniques and remember this is all real time it's being recorded to the monitor right now so there's no rendering after this we just have progress footage and that's part of the speed and fluidness of this type of a workflow so this is a project that i did with a company called super alloy we did a remote motion capture capture session where they were wearing two mocap suits and i was on a zoom call and kind of help oversee the action that was recorded for this kind of action film that we're creating here so that's where the action came from and the motion and the set was created by cassidy who is an art department guild iatc 800 i believe set decorator set designer rather in the film industry he designed this set for us in unreal engine because the art department is starting to work in unreal unreal engine quite a bit virtual art department whole another topic anyway let's look at the filming that we can do here so with this xbox controller i can move around like this move around the actors and that's going to kind of work like our virtual dolly but when it comes to pending and tilting the head that's what the nodo inertia wheels are for so this is how traditional camera operators like to work dps and if you're using a remote head or gimbals or anything like that you should be pretty used to this from a filmmaking point of view and we have that exact same control here comfort familiarity for the actual camera department we have that same functionality right here very smooth again the inertia wheels designed specifically for virtual production and they feel really smooth so they allow us to move around so again xbox controller moves us the dolly around and this does our pen and tilt so what if we want to change some of the lighting we have it mostly uh designed for the scene but what i can do here is i can raise the amount of fill in this scene essentially so this is kind of controlling the contrast ratio so i can make it very dark and kind of unnatural looking but i'll bring it up to somewhere like this and i can actually change the hide that'll show us here so the bottom right it shows the sky brightness essentially so this is bringing it up to something like this level is pretty good and we can also change the direction of the sun because you need to be able to change that per shot it's unlikely that one lighting setup would work for everything just like on set we change this per shot and we make it very easy you could definitely hand over this controller down here which is made by monogram to the virtual gaffer and you could have multiple people doing this or like me you could do it all at once yourself just takes a little bit longer so very importantly how do we get the people to move again on the monogram controller i have a jog dial here that will spin us through the mocap take and i can decide hey i want to pick up the scene from here for instance or i can go like this hit play and there's the shot and i'm live operating it now that was not a good shot but it's just to show that hey we can move the camera of course live while doing a take so that's the general way that this type of virtual production works it could be used for a high-end previs or it could be used for something like in the lion king where you have a preview and you have the director of the dp finding shots together or if you did it well enough i think this is close to that this could be final pixel this could actually be the footage that you use for the final product uh when i'm filming this i'm usually doing it remotely i'm here in my studio the directors in las vegas producer in la artists in europe and we're all in a zoom call but we'll all be watching the same filmmaking here um and so it's a distributed workflow potentially as well or you could all be in the same studio together at the same time so i'm moving the sun here i'm going to try to do one shot we can also i just want to show this we can also move the actors around the scene very very easily like that i'm going to scroll it back to where the flip is and just do a shot of the guy for one last uh demo here and i'll show you that we can actually go handheld fairly easily as well so i'm going to come around this way like this and let's switch to handheld so one second going to switch so what we have here is a vive controller that's being tracked by the sensors around me and this allows me to control the camera by going hand told so this is one of the other ways that a lot of filmmakers like to work and i'm just going to move around the virtual dolly so to speak to get a view of this that looks good something like this and again remember we're recording the whole time this is not an expensive rendering time process i can just roll the whole thing and just have a lot of footage or you can cut in between either way so i'm zooming in here changing the focal length uh let's check who's in focus okay so the guy is in focus now try to make that more clear like this you can see that the robot's out of focus and then he's in focus that's being tracked automatically and let's see i'm going to pull to like something like this and it's cool i can kind of like scrub through and be like okay is this going to work like that that looks like it'll be okay right so i'm going to scrub back to here give myself a little bit of lead time and i'll operate the shot handheld and play waiting for the warm-up phase giving the handheld a little bit of work so he's running at 0.5 speed as well and there's the flip and a little bit of handheld action at the same time so the last thing i want to show as well is that we have full uh full control of the time so if i bring it back to one speed like this this is playing back in real time boom gravity looks normal but depending on the director uh what they want we can also change the speed to something very very slow like this which is like i'm gonna have to go to like here and hit play so this is point zero one speed so i'm gonna have to just even go faster like this but you can see that i'm handheld in real time but he is moving extremely slowly like i think point zero one is too much for this particular shot so i'll do point one right so here we go he is moving extremely slowly but i'm still able to control the camera in real time we can even move the lights in real time and it's a very fast fun iterative process to control all this in real time no rendering just see it all right there maybe i follow the robot down and then i go back and it's a good time so that concludes the second demo working completely in a virtual world but doing it like we're filming on the real world with the roles more or less preserved of director dp art department and you're able to do it remotely as well and so this is one of my favorite types of virtual production and i really try to push as hard as i can with the best equipment hardware wise and best lighting that i can get to get this as close as possible to final pixel and i think as the unreal engine gets better at rendering and hardware gets even faster and techniques come out that are new that we will definitely be getting like 4k high resolution high fidelity final pixels out of this or again in the worst case it's just really really good previz or data that could be extracted from it like say just the camera work or where the lighting is placed for a final render workflow that's more typical to how vfx works at the moment so that wraps it up for the tour and demo of the virtual production studio thank you so much for watching that was fantastic matt thank you and it looks like we have a bunch of questions here on the chat so uh why don't we jump right in and answer some of these questions first question is from jibs guy how do you think visual effects production can relate in previz in a virtual production project or in the tvc project starting on the d in the deep end here okay so i mean if i understand the question you know i think that one of the big changes that happens with virtual production uh whether it be for led wall and i'm assuming this has to do with live action integration you know so if we're talking led wall or green screen is that we have to move um a lot of the asset creation up front into what would be typically pre-production so um if i'm understanding this correctly you know the we're going to see previz and typically post-production or asset creation that's all coming up front and it starts starts to happen really quickly uh in the process and i think that you know the the spectrum and the flow chart of when do you do what is is very much evolving and changing so much that i'm not sure that pre and previous post fizz that stuff um is more fluid now which i think is fun and i i hope that that means that especially in a time of working remotely that the director the dp the arts department the virtual art department um music editorial i don't know like that everyone can um be more present in that process whereas in your typical pre-production process there's only certain people that are going to be present during that and many of the decisions are made later uh but with virtual production whether that's a more fluid just previz or it's really trying to get the virtual art department everything lined up for an led wall shoot uh i think that we're going to see a lot more people involved earlier on and throughout the process which i think is a very cool part about virtual production that's great and you know along those lines i think one of the other things that people don't necessarily think about when they think about previz and virtual production is the fact that you have a much better sense of what your movie is going to be earlier on before you've actually you know pulled the trigger and started shooting so uh this is a really good opportunity for creatives to get their head around things it does change the dynamic a little bit you know i like to tease filmmakers who love to push everything to post to say you know if you build all your assets up front and you shoot virtually then what you see is what you get and there's really nothing wrong with making a decision you know as to what your your set should look like and what the environment should look like and that sort of thing so i think there's a lot to be said for previews looking more and more like the movie before you've actually made the movie i think there's a lot of there's a lot of merit to that um the next question we have is from antoine he says matt can you tell us more about your career path and specifically how did you get started working in virtual production yeah so uh when i was very young i wanted to get into video game production uh and just work it at blizzard and work on like starcraft and do game cinematics that was like a huge inspiration but being east coast and not as willing to i think to go to to the west coast there wasn't as much game production so i got more into traditional vfx and i went to college for computer science computer engineering with the idea to that that's that's how i thought you would get into visual effects that i didn't really know of any 3d animation or like artistic uh routes at the time so i got into computer science and i went to new york city on some internships and worked at um curious pictures digital mechanism bunch of vfx companies and eventually i made my way onto being on set because they had stages and i would shadow the vfx supervisor i got a lot of value out of uh internships in new york city i'm not sure if it's still like that viable but i got to be on set and learn a lot and i decided at that point given that computer graphics were a little slow there was no unreal engine at this point i don't i don't believe and i wanted to be on something a little faster moving so i got into production and i started working on movies and commercials as an ac and assists and loaders and whatnot and i started shooting music videos on the side as a dp and then really when the dslr revolution kind of exploded i was like right there and started to work at mtv and viacom and shot like hundreds of promos with all the slrs and that kind of graduated me into commercials and at that point new york city i started to do a lot of vfx commercials because it's always been my interest is to work on that stuff and started to get into previs working with the mill in new york and companies like mpc and started to do previz a lot like a lot a lot you know i was like oh like filmmaking and 3d like i've been trying to kind of get to this world for a while and then i uh discovered unreal engine or they discovered me either way and started to uh do it in real time and it finally all clicked together i was like okay now vfx can be fast it can be like live action so i i continue now to chase combining live reactive filmmaking like it's live action but combine it with graphics and now with unreal and real-time graphics and nvidia hardware and whatnot like now it is that like kind of perfect combination for me of live action and uh computer graphics together that's great sounds like an incredible journey that's basically just getting started we've got another question here from matt kemper he noticed that you do a lot of green screen virtual production and wants to know if there's a particular reason why you're not using live production on led wall technology i have done one led virtual production shoot and that was epic games at siggraph uh that was lovely uh pre i was so early this year it was a thought to get a studio and it wouldn't be massively difficult for me to get the led wall but currently it's it's just a little bit beyond the scope given the current situation to install it maintain a space bring actors to it so for me for now the time being a green screen is much more affordable fits in the house doesn't require like i don't have to like tie into my my house breaker box or or deal with extremely heavy and hot hardware so green screen is something i can do without it like completely destroying my house and really a lot of the fundamentals are still there you're still doing camera tracking i am currently working on having the lights match um be triggered by certain events right if it's like a time of day change or something like that so really all the fundamentals are there of camera tracking um honestly the camera tracking has to be more precise on green screen than an led wall um in this case in most cases and so you know when things clean up a little bit i would love to get my own studio and i have a lot of things i would love to do with my own led wall and test but it's kind of the current state of the world just makes that just a one step too far so green screen is just a little bit more uh house friendly and family friendly uh indeed so um now um we have a question from a fourth year engineering student from france who wants to know if you have any tips on how to get started working uh in this domain and uh maybe you know the minimal footprint that you can start with and and uh and work from there yeah so you know get a pc hopefully you know tower and so if it's an engineering background i guess really any i think a lot of this comes together when you get unreal engine running and you combine it with any tracked camera system uh so in this case this is a vive motion controller behind me you can use really any vr system and that tracking system allows you to put a camera to it right and it's like that's like the simplest thing you can do and it's a lot of fun and you start to move that around so you learn how unreal engine works how a game engine works in general and how you would move a camera in real time and then from there it's just kind of grows it's really where i started doing this too then it turns into like full body motion capture and then different types of sensors and you just start to be able to bring live data through live link and under into unreal engine and use it and if you start to go through those um different protocols that becomes very valuable and if you are engineering side you know the c plus plus side of it i know some people you can go work for immediately uh if you can code unreal engine c plus plus and do hardware integrations uh it's a very you know low level uh thing that's very necessary so you know if you're coming from any other field of specialization into virtual production it's a good time because say if you're coming from the live lighting industry and you know dmx in grand ma and etc and all you know how to map uh lights and design lighting shows we are doing that in live virtual concerts so you can come from live events if you're coming from you know architecture like all these different disciplines basically if you can get data into unreal engine uh that's that's pretty much where it starts in my opinion for me coming from camera side i just i i instantly think of like oh how do i make a camera move how do i spin this wheel and it does something how do i move that how do i tell the light to turn colors when i need to and if you're coming from any other discipline like moving robots or any of that stuff it's all i can't say all but a lot of it is applicable uh in virtual production and it's just getting that data into a game engine and then that goes on an led wall it becomes a virtual um set on a green screen but i would say it's it's at the tech a lot of it revolves around data into a game engine great um so we have looks like we have a couple minutes left uh and so i think it might be time to dive straight into the weeds with a couple of technical questions uh the first one is from carlos and he wants to know uh regarding the 3d sensor on the camera does it need to be at the center of the lens in order to get the parallax right it does not so we're talking about um you know essentially matching a real world camera and it's more than just the camera with the real world camera and the virtual camera they need to match uh as close as possible for the effect to work especially on green screen so there's multiple sensors and multiple ways of tracking movement and rotation like where is the real world camera and i showed the vanishing point system in this one and you can essentially put it anywhere it is good to keep it somewhat close to like we'll say the sensor plane for now and um but if you do end up offsetting it you just have to tell the system that hey we've moved that sensor this much up this much over this much forward and most systems can handle that if you're building them yourselves in unreal engine you just have to know how to put a transform offset uh and then from there to go slightly deeper into it it's not just the sensor plane that is actually doesn't matter all that much other than it's kind of like optical center you're actually looking to track the lens the optics uh and so there's words like entrance pupil optical center depends on what generation of um you know optical tracking you want to get into you actually the trickiest part is actually mapping a real world lens uh because you can have say like a zoom lens like this big maybe this is like a prime and it's like where in where in this lens is the 3d camera where does that go you call that entrance pupil and so say it's here right in the middle lens if you focus it actually moves and if you close down it moves again and if you zoom it really moves and then you combine that with distortion like this you have uh edge shading where like it's going to vignette chromatic aberration there's even more things that happen and so that's where the high-end solutions come in and it's not actually the camera tracking sensor in that case it's how you're going to map and encode the lens so focus iris zoom and a couple other things uh basically allow the higher end systems and maybe they'll be indian ones coming out to accurately track where that actual 3d the camera optical center should be uh and protocols like uh cook i lds zeiss they're kind of like the older generation that'll give you some of the data but the the newest up-to-date protocol is zeiss extended data that's in i believe cp3s might get a set of those cp3xd seep and then the supreme xds or just supremes and then the fujinon premista line all three of those zooms are encoded with this new data and it has everything it has factory calibrated distortions edge like you know shading has everything in it and it's one limb will pour out back to the system so that's the best so that's a long answer but those are those are the kind of the package you're looking at for matching them together well thank you matt and um uh i hope that uh all of you are following matt on social media i i every morning i i look at the news but the first thing i do before i look at the news is i look at matt's feed on twitter to see what crazy thing he's doing today so i hope you do the same thing so please follow matt he's doing some amazing work and i want to thank you so much for being here with us today matt really means a lot to all of us so thank you it's a pleasure thanks for having me all right so uh now we have the results of our poll uh for those of you who uh responded to the poll the question was how soon do you think movie theaters will be reopening with first run releases and uh it was an interesting breakdown here so um about 11 felt that theaters would be open by december 1st of this year 40 percent believe that march 1st of 2021 is a more likely date uh 27 percent said june of 2021 june 1st of 2021 and 20 said sometime after june of 2021 so thank you for your responses and um we'll we'll see how that goes and see when it's actually safe to go back to the movies so thank you and now we have coming up our next session is from the producers guild of america and it's called the producer's view of virtual production [Music] i'm excited to introduce this panel of truly talented producers who are all experts in virtual production this will be a fun informative conversation and there'll be some time at the end for questions so um i'll start with christina christopher lee storm is the founder of asher xr vice chair of diversity and inclusion for ais and is also a pga new media board delegate she's an award-winning producer with a unique blend of animation real time and live action feature producing working at the cross section of story and technology and christina right now is working on location so thanks for joining us um all the way from vancouver we also have catherine brillhart catherine's an award-winning cinematographer and vfx producer she's currently the executive producer and director of virtual production on the film ripple effect a short r d film that just recently completed production the project explores two different led walls smart stage workflows as well as the use of real-time visualization techniques to develop covered protocols very timely and during film planning and production and finally john canning is the executive producer for new media and experiential at digital domain and former chair of the pga new media council he focuses on vfx for any screen big or small and has a long history in new and emerging formats for entertainment so welcome everybody and uh i'll let everybody do a brief introduction of themselves starting with christina thanks i also just want to thank ais and this entire conference it's a really important topic that we're covering and also want to thank our moderator jenny ogden and the producers guild for um partnering together um [Music] i find it just really fortunate myself to be having a background in production i did a lot of work um not only um in features documentaries and short form content but what was interesting was i also had a background and a work experience and visual facts at rhythm and hughes um from there it took me to a path to um to dreamworks animation where bonnie arnold uh recruited me to come and work at the studio she was a the co-president at the time and she um it was really really great it was um a look into how animation um is produced i started in feature technology building the pipeline and then also artist management but then the last few years i worked as the head of the advanced creative technology team which was a new endeavor for us to look at our ip look at all of our content and see if there's a way to just expand it so expanded in all platforms and all different types of content with ar vr xr so in a very short period of time when i came onto the group we didn't really have a lot of ford like um public-facing projects um but our film how to train your dragon was coming out how did you change your dragon pin world was coming out and within a very short period of time we i produced uh three um location-based vr projects uh one was uh i fly one uh which is like you're in vr flying in a wind tunnel another was um a uh the hidden world virtual tour which was a partnership with positron and um and walmart and the third was with dreamscape and what was neat was the two of those projects were actual well actually one was um we won the lumiere from the um how to shoot your dragon hidden world virtual tour um after leaving so what was neat about the advanced creative technology team is that we really thought about the future of content the future of of uh production in terms of utilizing real-time um game engine and what was really exciting was our work with real-time digital characters and um just really uh partnering with with vendors and folks that that we're having this discussion as well how far can we push it after leaving dreamworks as as jenny mentioned i did um venture off because there was so much going on in the virtual production space that i started my own shingle uh asher xr and as jenny mentioned i am currently on location i'm producing i'm producing partners with david o yellow and i we are in uh heavy pre-production and we start principal very very soon so yeah thank you christina um catherine i i think everybody would love to hear more about your latest production ripple oh yeah absolutely thank you so much for having me uh on this channel i'm so excited to speak about this so um ripple effect is a unique project it's um as industry-backed short film an r d project where we had the chance to test led smart screen stage workflows uh we really focused on pushing boundaries for what you could achieve with pixel in camera and um and kind of we wanted to crack open that conversation in a bigger way in the industry and we're also publishing a white paper of our findings so we can give a little bit more structure for producers and directors and creatives who want to put products like this together great and did you have some slides to show yeah i do i will share so this uh this is a wide view of the xr stage that we shot our truck sequences in the stages located in pacquiao we tested out three different unique scenarios for our stakeholders an interior scene an exterior scene and a vehicle uh sequence and so the picture that you're seeing right now is um the virtual content that we created the stage and the truck right before the crew came on set um there's an image that's kind of behind the scenes of one of the environments that they were driving through so we have different complexities on this one rotating the world rotating the truck practical elements wind finding horizon line scale um really cool and then this is uh just quickly a frame the capture through the lens of the camera um kind of stepping forward to our interior dining room scene it was designed in a way where we could use an led wall to light and also have a digital background that would show parallax as we move through the scene we had an added layer of complexity using a material like plexiglass as our clear surface going between the led wall and our camera lens so we experienced you know moire and other complexities like um dealing with darker higher contrast content that people might not have be exploring within testing with right now a couple quick images of what it looks like to shoot with coded safety practices on set it's very interesting there's like a wider shot of where you can see the ceiling in your full room and here is also an image of what we were able to capture through the camera this shot is outside of the dining room looking in which is where you see the reflection of our environment on that plexiglas uh our exterior scene the battlefield we shot at lux machina down the arts district on their test stage and it created a whole different world of complexities and test cases it came right and say the big bullet points were matching a practical set in a virtual set you know from that pre-production process all the way into production and live color grading to get that scene to match how to design for that and then i would also say from a cinematographer's standpoint um architecting your shooting map and your shooting plan to shoot in relatively one direction and rotate the world and the characters to kind of match so that was sort of an interesting scenario this is uh just another behind the scenes shot of us working together and a shot from the camera during our live feed and then just to fast forward more uh we were really excited to have um greg chacho who's also an executive producer had a production post on the project set up an amazing remote workflow that uh helped us through the every phase of production on this project and depicted here kind of in one image is a little slice of what he provided for us this shows a live feed from the camera and a live feed from a fish angle surveillance cam of our set so that our stakeholders and anyone working remotely on our project could tune in and engage with us in real time all the time and then last but not least as we work through our creative project and case study on this film in parallel we developed a coven safety visualization product process and project using uh typical real time like previous techviz techniques and photogrammetry with the help of digital film tree icbr and virtual wonders to scan our stages early from the very beginning so that we could not only reuse those assets in our techviz process with payload entertainment and icbr but we could also create these amazing interactive safety vis experiences for production to plan around our team collected international data and was able to ingest this data into our code planning tool and we could in the the path that we were validating is one where you might be able to generate a coveted safety scenario if you input different information so this project was in process and helped us along the way and it's an incredible tool because in addition to this sort of interactive view in real time um you can also generate 2d overhead maps that are a producer's best friend when you just need to iterate and get you know create a war map or see the data in a different way so this is very brief but a summary of what we did on the project great thank you um and john of course can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background i know you're uh very busy over at digital domain you've also got an amazing background uh back from your nbc universal days and also i i believe you're an advisor on several different technologies all those other things and neighbors i saw you pop in hey everyone uh i i like to say my job is now visual effects for any screen um since i've come to digital domain and uh focus on the new media side of things it's the not film television or commercials uh but in reality it's how we're applying this cg technology visual effects to all these other different processes if you think about the xr world uh you think about the game world everything is increasing in fidelity resolution and going in real time and so bringing in leveraging the background that i had in the immersive technologies and and interactive world of interactive television and things like that it's sort of culminating in this moment of real-time production uh going to different kinds of screens and then of course layering this thing that we call virtual production on top of it now and so at dd we've been spending a lot of time and we had to virtualize a studio almost overnight uh to start working on projects where everybody has to go work remotely so you know for us it was instantly experiencing these things uh of suddenly not only are you working on projects remotely but you have to worry about how your employees are connecting that the cloud-based technologies that were good idea or interesting ideas suddenly became let's focus on how do we work with that and then you get into this aspect of what we call virtual production which can be simply everything from well we can only send a person to a location so how do we capture that to uh the emphasis on pre-biz and set up to the fact that you know we have a mocap stage but only so many people can be on that stage one given time so the remote access your your importance of a remote video village uh becomes even more important when you may have people halfway around the world that need to attend the shoot or make directorial decisions um and then we get into this how do we create environments and catherine's experiment i couldn't have been more timely um that project was really the we now have to go figure this out right where virtual production the the idea of using led walls was interesting and some shows did it and four particular shots a lot of that was you know came down to uh well we don't really need to do this never done it before we won't worry about it to well we need to think about how to do this because we have to limit the number of people on a set we may limit the fact that we can't go somewhere um all of these things started to play and accelerate this technology so it's making it a very fascinating time to start being the nexus of this and to see how we can work with this different technology and still get our jobs done great let's start this off christina can you tell us just a big picture overview what is virtual production yeah i mean in simple terms because a lot of people have been hearing about it especially when the mandalorian came out with behind the scenes and how you know how they you how they utilize virtual production and so in in short it's really really simple um and then okay let me just also say as we went into uh working from home remotely a lot of people felt that oh i'm working virtually so that's virtual production but for everyone here and everyone on this panel really what we look at is virtual production is utilizing game engine that enables us to see our assets in real time and so it's also another way of looking at it from a producer standpoint is we are literally taking our cg assets the things that john was talking about and we're able to bring them on into production and actually see those things in real time and there's a lot of variations in that mix but when i describe that and the way we also describe mandalorian it's basically final pixel but i want to kind of take a step back real quick and describe a few other uh technologies that have been around for a while actually um that are considered virtual production and so sort of how i have been describing this um is there's um i would call like four main areas it's there's the visualization part which includes uh pitch vis pre-viz um location scouting um tech vids um stunt vids post fizz and then we also have the um second area which is like the performance capture the motion capture facial capture um all utilizing virtual production the third would be like a hybrid hybrid green screen um which were all like that have been used for a long time in sports and broadcast and then the fourth which is what a lot of people are seeing and i like to call like the one percent of virtual production which is not necessarily a good thing to call it the one percent but that is the final the live led wall final pixel and so a lot of conversations are surrounding like oh you know we want to take it there we want to see that but i also just employ to my fellow producers that there's a lot of other parts to virtual production that you should really look into because we of course want the i we want the the hope is that everyone has an opportunity to use or leverage virtual production and it doesn't have to end up being the one percent or the final pixel yeah and i think what you said was very important is there are different tools and technologies a some of this has been around for a while and now kind of getting lumped into the bandwagon of virtual production because that's the cool hot buzzword if you will but it's it's again these are all different tools and technologies to hopefully make a production go either more smoothly to visualize what you need to visualize and producers have to constantly remember that a lot of this is interesting but does it help solve the problem you're trying to achieve um and that's where i think that's the the back and forth that folks have to have is uh you know how does this tools and technologies play in to what you're trying to produce at the end of the day yeah i absolutely agree with that as well i think creative is going to drive the tech and uh just for anybody who's listening who's not about an indie budget or a smaller budget virtual production can be a piece of your production it doesn't have to be the entire thing maybe there's certain shots where creatively you need to solve certain problems and just using and samsung 8k led monitor is all you need maybe just integrating like blackbox studio products or other products that are accessible um that are open source and codeable to what you need you can pretty much tailor any of these tools to specific creative demands awesome so kathryn would you share a little bit more about your experience and how you first became involved in working in virtual production sure um i'm a cinematographer and i would say for me the beginning of virtual production movement would be the transition from film to digital cinematography because it allows you to see in real time dailies and i think there are other aspects of our industry kind of over history that have been becoming more real-time and more digital and more accessible and all of these different aspects um are kind of advancing and coming together so all that to say um i got into visual effects early on um in my career and could start seeing from the post-visual effects side and from the digital cinematography side that there was going to be a point where these two things were going to come together and so it really inspired me and got me passionate about exploring visual effects at every angle and that's kind of how i got into producing and visual effects supervision and i think developing all of these different skill sets um you know being exposed even in that journey to early on like zoic labs uh zeus pipeline that mike bromley developed just these little pieces and then also through my involvement with the ves participating in the asu's joint version production committee is 2013 just being in the room with all these thought leaders coming from visualization uh locations art department kind of just being part of this amazing slice of history where the conversations were all happening in one room so i'm very excited about having the opportunity to guide the mechanics and the test case studies for ripple effect um so that you know to kind of continue this conversation with all these departments in the industry awesome just perfect um john i i know in the past we've had many conversations about the different tools technologies and techniques and production and and really that they're a tool and it's about what is the best tool to bring your story to life that you're trying to tell um can you describe a little bit more or drill down a little bit more in the various into the various types of virtual production sure i we started this conversation a little bit earlier where uh you know if you you think about it now what we're starting to see is the how do we capture a location right you know traditional scouting somebody takes a bunch of pictures shoot some video they come back maybe everybody you know 20 people on a helicopter going from location to a location location um if you think about it now what we're able to do is even man portable lidar units 360 cameras being able to go capture a location uh digitally and potentially at a rough view that comes back and enables a group of people maybe even in real time and disparate locations to be able to view that location decide if they like that location if we think about capturing that location from the get-go photogrammetry lidar then what you're doing is you're able to capture that location could be a set could be a physical location you may have to then build that um and use that and for whatever you were going to do whether it's the previz but potentially now as we mentioned into producing final pixel on an led wall and so um then we move into the engines so a real-time engine like unity or unreal where we're able to you know they're formally considered a game engine now i call them real-time engines because we're using them for so many other things other than games as well but the ability to drop maya assets into this environment be able to manipulate the environment to be able to change the lighting conditions of the environment it becomes almost a dynamic tool set for a previz and into production but then you're building a visualization for say this led wall and look i mean it you know they've run visualizations on led walls from simple just video right you know playing out video using a dmx type of system uh to play video out on there and that the classic uh scenarios are typically car or outside windows ripple effect use it in in very effectively in that way where what you want is a vehicle moving through somewhere um but you may not be able to shoot on that location um you know you think about using an led platform you could have your sunset last 10 hours you know the golden hour is no longer we got to catch it at this moment the drawbacks are you know still understanding lensing uh the more effect it is not the you know the answer to every solution but what we're looking at is how do we start building digital assets sooner in the process so that we can carry them through you may at previz have something that's a rough digital asset that you will know you're going to uprez and continue to improve because it's eventually going to be on that led wall as the backdrop um and then moving through that process and in some cases some folks are actually using the real-time engines to actually render out final pixel but what we see is incorporating that as a tool set into a pipeline uh we're still using some of you know maya to create some of the initial assets we're mocapping but it's the ability to when you're on a mocap stage see what you're actually creating so we drop the environment overlaid in our mocap stage so actors can actually see themselves acting in the environment moving that through the process so these are just you know some of the tools and techniques we're playing with um and again what it does to a producer is that it makes the producers think about you know this isn't necessarily about oh it's so much cheaper doing it this process what it's doing is making you think about where you're spending your money um you know it's where you know in if you were shooting against green screen uh and you may think not worry about what's going to be the thing on the green screen until you get into post well if it's an led wall now you have to have that produced you know the benefits are the actors get to see what they're acting in as opposed to pretend this green fuzzy tennis ball is a creature and you're in a mountain scene um that can change that can evolve again the changing of setups uh being able to go from night to day um some of these things have become a lot of advantage but it also means you have to think about some of this much earlier in the process the art and the departments have to work together to create that earlier in the process because you're trying to capture when we say final pixel you're capturing in camera both your actor and potentially that background and you're hoping that that's good you're not going to necessarily have to fix that in post so to speak so those are the goals and those are the kinds of things we're talking about as we look at it uh in in the virtual production world right so christina what are the key factors producers should know when considering virtual production um what a really good question i mean i would say like 2020 is really all about innovation uh curiosity and creativity and i think and safety protocols and safety oh my gosh yes and safety critical um i think when producers are thinking about virtual production there's a lot of factors involved but i i would say the approach let's just start with the approach the approach should be one like is my show or my project is it the do i have the right people in place within my group let's say their director and whatnot are they going to be a good fit for virtual production which means um testing things out you know our industry has is incredible we've been doing this for so many years we've been doing it it's basically a traditional production is done in such a way it's very much set in place virtual production is not necessarily that and i think we have to look at it as producers we look at it from what we know as pre-production development pre-production production post distribution we have to actually meld and knock down those walls of those different departments i think we have to we have to think of it really holistically and not what they you know that everyone talks about like throw it over the fence type of thing so what john's been saying is that what i do is i think about okay if i wanted to take this particular sequence and i want that sequence to be in camera uh final camera final pixel then i need to know that at the very beginning and start to really plan out those assets start to plan those things out the other thing that is that i would just um encourage the producers is your pre-production you know um a lot of people think you know in production that's where i'm going to spend all the money everyone's starting the entire circus is going all the crew members and it's actually a little bit different with virtual production i you know you could scoop that over you could scoot like the the spend the amount of money being spent in the people that are coming on you want a bit more on a earlier like early pre-production part for concept for design for pre-visualization for visualization so that you're really jamming on that and then when you get to production what happens is that it's not so stacked necessarily um so it's a different way of looking at it but the other thing i would say is also you know um really really leaning in and being brave about the technology it's like this is the new this is the future of film production and so it's like catherine myself and john and jenny we're here to help usher that in we're here to help create the most collaborative diverse type of uh producers and filmmakers for the future and what's incredible from the other aspect that i would love to talk about is also what john had said about like location scouting it's a perfect example right in today's age today with covid and all the requirements the safety requirements you you that you might not be able to deploy a team out to xyz locations uh one is the country opening it up for people like war river based and if you can get through to that country then you have to quarantine you know and you're usually going to according to you for about two weeks so those two weeks or costs your production okay what we're suggesting and what we're we think that are really smart tools is deploying out a local you know lidar team to capture what you want um and sort of create this really um really strategic and thoughtful uh remote team working so that you have your team let's say you want to shoot in um in morocco you have a team there that's already deployed capturing lidari met and then you can bring it back in while you're you're maybe your main team is back in la or wherever and um these things kind of help the other thing is that you know in physical production in traditional production you're always looking for that location to exist unless you you know and we know that with the the use of uh computer graphics that we've we pushed the boundaries of that virtual production is just allowing that even more so it's allowing that so that then you now can potentially see that and it's not it's it's not at the tail end of the pipeline where you're like oh okay so that's what it looks like um and so it's really um virtual production is designed for a mindset of collaboration where you're going to pull in everyone and have everyone chime in and we're we're basically paving new roads and so that's that's what i would encourage uh producers when they're considering virtual production i i have one pro tip uh which is if you have google earth or the wander app on like oculus quest you can actually get a you know 3d view of a lot of different locations on the planet and never leave your own house right like it's not going to go you know get you the the photogrammetry the lidar but if you're just like literally going well we can't go to that location because you know there's the quarantine you can actually pop a vr headset on and do a quick visit uh to a location even on the ground level be able to spin around at least to get a sense of it so it's one of those things that's kind of a i'd say lo-fi but it's it's a way to do scouting or at least an initial quest actually i just want to add something because we had a cool photogrammetry story on our project um ryder gombos our vp supervisor scanned our truck early on in the process like way early on and then he just did a rough reconstruction got it going in sketchfab and it meant that any department head on our crew could put a scale accurate version of the truck in physical space in their homes where they were designing and kind of walk around with their phone or ipad as a virtual camera to actually scope out the truck it was like sort of the inverse of what you do in a game engine and then we were able to actually host a um a group in person session at one of our early test phases on xr stage place that cg truck with the walls behind us and that smart stage and have our dp walk us through their actual shots um that's that actual photogrammetry in the uh sorry asset point all the way onto the screen as an animated asset but it was really cool to use it in the beginning of our pipeline like you're describing for anything from virtual scouting through previous characterism and final shoot awesome jenny i just want to jump in for a second um we have some questions on uh the chat if you don't mind uh addressing a couple questions there um the first question is from jim asking how are producers now approaching the budget breakdowns and evolving new positions on the crew knowing that they're going to spend more upfront on these virtual production shows and projects versus the normal visual visual effects and post hit at the tail end of the schedule i mean i'll chime in initially on this i think that's exactly it you know it's like oh that's going to be the visual effects i think we have to begin to blend those um and it's it's not it's the it's possibly even like here's the enviro it's just like a location like i'm gonna i know that this location will cost x amount of dollars so perhaps it's looking at it from an environment standpoint like we built you know you're going to charge this amount you know line item this amount for this particular location environment right break it down i had a actually this morning i had a call with a producer who has a series um and you know wanted to jump into using a particular kind of technology and you know first it was like okay what kind of budgets are you looking at per episode and then thinking you know and having them walk backwards and say look you need to go through your script and look at what you're trying to achieve and then you know measure up like everything could be a vfx shot everything could be cool and digital do you have that budget what are the necessary things that you you know oh my god we don't know how to do that practically um so you know part of it is is again it's what we've always done where you're breaking down scripts and you're figuring out what your stunts are and things like that now there's that extra layer of saying is it a practical location or is it a digital location um the the kinds of folks that you hire i mean look visual effects companies we're all adapting that so it's potentially you're going to you're a bfx company but you're engaging them even in pre-production saying okay some of these shots instead of having you produce them six months from now you're going to be produced you're going to be working on them now yeah so it's again it's shifting some of that um you know in the in the the but it's it's it's breaking it down and then starting to ask those questions i think is the the first step and i think this is where having a strong creative direction like a visual a visual effects producer or bad experience part of the effects supervisor up front during the script breakdown process is essential because you do want that creator to drive to drive some of the choices that you're making about what tools you're going to use because from a director's point of view all of the materials and textures and crew and you know all these ingredients that you're using to create this process are going to affect the final look of your image or the field or um you know your creative intent as you move down the pipeline so the more educated you are on how you want to communicate your vision using these tools and working with producers who are willing to try new things and try new tech and um that sort of thing will make your project stronger yeah it's interesting you mentioned that because one of the things that we've experienced in the past 20 years of visual effects is a lot of creative decisions have been pushed off to post-production and now we're shifting gears and we're getting back to the way it used to be you built the set and that was the set you shot on uh so it's an interesting time where you have in some cases you consider it a playground you really get to experiment before you make the movie but i guess there's probably a little bit of a danger zone there when you get on set and you see these demos it's like how easy it is to move that building or that tree or that mountain and i'm thinking as a producer is this the right time to be doing that or should we've done that a few weeks ago it's two philosophies right fix it and fix it in posts and do it either way or you know you could be a team that's like hey let's do a little blend and because we're our blend and yeah i mean i would just you know i i think it's the it's a time of disruption so i think i think it shouldn't be if someone's saying oh let's just do it this way that's a traditional thought i think i think that's what i'm saying is that it's like let if you can blur those lines and then look at it holistically and and you know i for me personally it'd be like i i look at it both grammatically as well as well very much creatively and and budgetarily right because we're all facing those budget concerns so if i know i want this one shot that's supposed to be in fiji or where wherever i'm not going to get that let's say i want to shoot that early next year right we're going to still have the same safety protocols those safety protocols are not going away they're not going away so i will look at the the holistic project and say this particular these particular set pieces i want to really lean in and then the other ones can i still do within the confines of my safety protocol and kind of be more creative again because there's always going to be budgetary concerns and i think then within that play but that that sandbox then okay how far can we push it you know we have time for one more question and i think you kind of approach this but i think just to hear from everybody in the panel you could talk about any genres or types of shows that would uh really be able to leverage virtual production um you know people think of the bigger budget sci-fi and horror films and things like that but could you weigh in on the types of production where you see this is headed in the next 18 to 24 months i i would say if your project requires a large travel place you know that you're not currently in let's say let's just say hypothetically you're based in l.a your team's based in l.a and you want to shoot in south africa or i don't know australia new zealand uh and and get some really outdoor amazing set pieces i think absolutely that would be smart because in order to travel you don't have to necessarily travel that entire team then over or spin up that um i think there's there's things that we're facing um it's an overlay also with covid safety protocols that we have to look at it not just like i want to pick the i want to pick the best location you're we're we're being uh forced to make decisions based around safety as well so yeah i think honestly i've had a lot of um a lot of inquiries also for unscripted um being able to do some really creative uh environments for unscripted and competition based series television um that typically

Channel: Advanced Imaging Society

Views: 71,623

Keywords: virtual production, filmmaking, remote control, remote collaboration, virtual set, game engine, final pixel

Id: 81f6FPnWMCI

Length: 88min 0sec (5280 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020