LED Walls

A Film Production Revolution

The business of film and television production is going through some major changes with applications of gaming technology being applied to studio production.

At the Alex Theatre in Melbourne’s St Kilda, tests have been under way with LightScape World who have developed the ‘Virtual Studio’ for new studio techniques for filming.

These new studio techniques allow the filmmaker to capture complex visual effects straight to camera utilising Unreal Engine technology developed in the gaming industry and utilising large, ultra high-quality LED video screens.

This ‘Holo-deck’ style technology reduces the need for green screen filming and CG post-production.

There are other benefits such as no green screen colour spill, and putting the actors in a real environment produces light reflections of the scene they are in which creates a more realistic effect. But the real magic is dynamically updating the background to match the perspectives and parallax of the camera.

In other words, the whole set on the screen moves in perspective with the camera moves resulting in a very realistic shot. It works in combination with a motion capture tracker which is aware of where the camera is and how it is moving.

There have been very few cases overseas that have adapted the technology and studio process but HBO’s ‘West World’ and Disney’s ‘The Mandalorian’ are two.

Mike Seymour stated in FXGuide.com recently that this technology is producing stunning visuals for Disney’s ‘The Mandalorian’ series.

Industry Light and Magic (ILM) is making its new end-to-end virtual production solution, ILM StageCraft, available for use by filmmakers, agencies, and showrunners worldwide.

Over 50 percent of The Mandalorian Season 1, screened on Disney Plus, eliminated location shoots entirely by utilising the technology
in studio.

The LED walls provided the correct highlights, reflections, and pings on the Mandalorian’s reflective surfaces. These would have been completely absent from principle photography if it had been shot the old-fashioned way.

Actors performed in an immersive and massive six-metre-high by 270-degree semicircular LED video wall and ceiling with a 23-metre diameter performance space, where the practical set pieces were combined with digital extensions on the screens.

Some weeks ago, the Alex Theatre made available studio space for a large nine metre by six metre u-shape LED wall to be erected to begin tests.

Phil Ross from Pro Screens who works in the production industry on events said, “We found ourselves in a really unusual time and this new technology, the way to adapt LED screen walls to film work which creates a virtual studio, was presented to me.

“I needed to pivot my business because I’ve got millions of dollars’ worth of equipment sitting in a warehouse gathering dust. It looked like something so fantastic and exciting but from the word go, I realised that this was a mammoth undertaking.”

Phil realised that this direction needed more than his expertise.

“I could see to do this properly would take more than just what I had. It had to be a collaboration. It had to be a multi-layered coming together of different industries.

“There’s also going to be a great deal of research and development in pioneering a new way of filming. There’s three technologies, the LED screen, the filming process and the Unreal Engine.”

Eddie Postma, LightScape World CPO said, “Our first focus has been on getting all the technology working. There’s the technology with the Unreal 3D environments, then there’s the camera, and then there’s making those talk to each other and work together.

“You need to understand how to make the environment work for the camera and then how to make the camera work for the environment.”

The production crew had success with many elements in the filming including the DMX lighting, which is fully integrated and controlled by automation from Unreal Engine.

You need to understand how to make the environment work for the camera and then how to make the camera work for the environment

Phil added, “So once we got the hardware down pat, we have to pivot and turn to the world building or environment building. My skill and speciality is being able to make the three different technologies work together.”

Greg Fendis, LightScape World CEO said, “The workflow is more efficient now. Post-production is drastically reduced as most of the work is done during the production phase. Time and resource efficiencies are common outcomes of the virtual studio”.

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Greg believes that what they are doing is going to be affordable to the small to medium film maker.

“You don’t need $10,000,000 or $20,000,000 in set-up costs. Virtual studios are customised to cater for small studios with 500 LED panels all the way to the Mandalorian size studios with 5,000 panels.

“We are pioneering this new mode of creativity and making it available to the film and TV industry,” said Greg.

“The amount of time you save in production and post-production is phenomenal,” said Eddie. “It’s around one in two; for one hour in production you save more than two hours in post-production.

“There’s a lot of tech, it’s not an easy entry, because there’s a lot of tech you have to work out. It’s taken quite a few weeks to learn and every day you learn more. You have to have the lighting balanced a certain way, and you have to find what that balance is.”

“It is going to truly revolutionise the film industry. It’s not that we are creating an incremental change to existing studios. This is a giant leap forward,” said Greg Fendis.

lightscape.world

alextheatre.org.au

etainment.com.au

CX Magazine – October 2020   

LIGHTING  |  AUDIO  |  VIDEO  |  STAGING  |  INTEGRATION

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