The New Technology Changing Production

Until now, if you want to film people – actors, company leaders, outside experts – at any location – a rented home, one of your stores, a hospital setting, pre-built set, outdoors – you actually have to get those people to the location. Obvious, yes, but often painfully:

  • You have to identify the locations and make sure they’re available. Ever try to free up a hospital room for a shoot these days? Or get into retail stores before 10pm? Or find the perfect home for your commercial shoot? It almost always comes with compromises.
  • You have to travel the people to the locations, blocking out calendars and hoping for no travel delays.
  • You have to make sure the locations are fully prepped on the day of the shoot, which can take hours or days, often requiring permits, not to mention the risk of loud audio interruptions.
  • For outdoor shoots, you have to pray to the weather gods and have backup plans.

Virtual Production brings new possibilities to many projects.

It’s not for every project, but the potential is growing. Using Unreal Engine, our artists can now build digital sets and locations – indoors and out – that place talent in settings that look very real. Those people can then present or act in those settings as if they’re really there. Except they’re not. They’re really on a set, with all of the convenience and cost savings a set can bring.

We suppose virtual production could be called “green screen on steroids” but even that doesn’t begin to describe how much better it is. See this recent footage from our studio:

The people in these scenes aren’t green screened in front of stationary backgrounds like the old days, they’re in the scenes, with backgrounds that move with the camera moves. Because of the breadth of benefits – creative and cost-wise – the technology can serve surprisingly broad purposes: commercial production, executive messaging, employee training, even independent filmmaking. A number of Hollywood shows use this same technology all the time, because it works.

Intrigued enough to learn more? Some simple next steps:

  1. Call us for a live demo. You have to see it to believe it, and it gives us a chance to assess its fit for your particular video production needs. Once we understand your potential use cases, we can even customize the demo for those uses.
  2. For clients who want to recreate work environments or build real-world sets for commercials, we digitize actual physical environments using 3D technologies such as photogrammetry. This is actually easier than it sounds. We’ve already done it for healthcare clients, manufacturers, and retailers.
  3. For clients looking to create spaces that don’t exist at all, our teams brainstorm, pre-visualize, and prototype digital sets for your review. Maybe you want to present from your new yet-to-be-built headquarters, build the ideal corporate training center, or establish an ESPN Sportscenter-like presence for your corporate communication efforts.

Contact us today to explore virtual production’s time and cost saving potential in your world.

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