“Fix it in Prep”

Lessons from working in Virtual Production

Film productions are obviously being affected by Covid-19 as much as any industry, with shoots being heavily hit by testing and schedules being moved out to mitigate the associated risks. 

Looking ahead to a “post-pandemic” world, virtual production and LED volumes are already being touted as a potential solution to some of these challenges. And that has brought me and the Territory Studio team to an interesting juncture. 

We’ve been fortunate that, for many years, our position on films and our screen graphics work has allowed us to span pre-production, production and post-production. We begin with the art department, before moving through into working with the VFX team. This breadth is something I really value in the work we do, and I always feel privileged to partner with both these teams and often the director and producer too.

In seeing the rise of virtual production and in researching our own involvement further, it’s become clear the increasing closeness of the art department, the VFX department and the camera department will be felt by a greater number of people in 2021. This has always been the case of course, with the best productions collaborating closely, but I see virtual production increasing the depth and quality of collaboration going forward. As part of my research into this trend, I’ve been talking with many production designers and art departments to better understand the industry’s current knowledge of virtual production and how they want to engage with it in the future.

I think the first thing to mention is that virtual production is not really that new – iconic LED work on the series 24, the work of Framestore on Gravity and, more recently, the work of Stagecraft and ILM on the Mandalorian are all fantastic examples of how to do it well. Tracing further back, it feels like an incredible upgrade on the classic technique of back projection - a throwback to a bygone era of projecting footage onto a screen behind an actor to combine in shot. I can’t help but feel a sense of romance when it comes to this type of film-making, similar to how I feel about optical printing and matte painting. Such techniques create a sense of craft and artistry and of using smoke and mirrors to create visual trickery and suspend disbelief for the audience.

The modern equivalent however provides a few more advantages that we found quite unique when we started our own LED – creating VFX content work on David Fincher’s latest feature film, Mank. Firstly, it requires the team to be delivering for a shoot and therefore working closely with both the designers of a film set and the director and cinematographer to help realise their vision. In essence, this means that VFX is being brought forward in the production schedule as we’re required to work in prep instead of post. As a result, we found we needed to bring the director far closer to the creative process of asset building and shot creation. Of course, this director had no problem in working so closely with our team and giving very precise and insightful notes!

Ashley Pay, our CG supervisor, and Simon Carr, our VFX supervisor, flew over to LA to work directly with Fincher, planning out cameras together in Maya to get the lensing and positions exactly right ahead of the live shoot. As part of this close working relationship, we also got to talk about film grain, historical accuracies and timing the landmarks to pass the camera at specified points in each shot. The mantra of “fix it in post” was set aside for getting everything ready ahead of the shoot. We had to make sure that Eric the DP would have everything he needed for the day and that David was completely in control of how the action played out.

In my research with art departments, I’ve also noticed a real desire from their teams to take control of these tools and be more present in these conversations. The production designer is designing these worlds after all and would need to have oversight of all that is put forward so that the virtual sets complement the real ones. 

Again, there’s lessons to be learned here. We were asked to only model the parts of the set you could see. In the same way a physical set is built on “flats” (sections of wall visible to the camera) anything not seen wasn’t built. By doing this with our virtual set, all the budget actually went up on screen and therefore wasn’t wasted. The more I work across departments, the more I realise how much we have to learn from each other.

I’ve now created a document that lays out virtual production for the art department. It’s a working document really informed by many views and still to be worked on and evolve. I’m now looking for visual effects teams and camera departments to contribute as well and I’d love to hear from people to help with this. 

Feel free to get in touch if the document is of interest. I’m fascinated to hear from people working in this space and exploring how different departments are collaborating on these projects.