FEATURE | V I RTUAL PRODUCT ION
not build it as a rough, but to build it as a final effect at the beginning – that’s a huge shift. The challenge from a technical standpoint, which I believe will be resolved, is that in order for everything to run in engine in real time, it has to be lightweight. “So that’s the challenge people are facing,” Shea continues, “by taking the final film resolution assets and putting them in a game engine, it slows the engine down. But that’s not insurmountable. I think everyone’s working on that right now, trying to figure out with graphics cards and the hardware in general how much geometry you can actually put in to an engine and run in real time.” She adds: “The more you can put in, the faster you can work and the closer we are to this workflow revolution.” So, although the CG characters seen in the monitors might be a lower resolution because they have already been realised in full resolution, you won’t have to rebuild them, which is the case now. But Shea is quick to manage expectations: “We’re not there yet. It hasn’t been fully achieved yet, but it is something that everyone within the industry is pursuing currently.” MPC’S GENESIS Developed by Technicolor’s VFX studio, MPC, and now overseen by a dedicated virtual production team at Technicolor, the Genesis production platform is the culmination of a development programme to address the requirements of this new, real-time virtual production environment.
Genesis provides tools that give directors, production designers, lighting designers, directors of photography, VFX and post-production supervisors – among others – the ability to simultaneously integrate and manipulate live action and computer-generated assets. “Genesis, for us, is a component that runs alongside a game engine,” explains Shea. “At the very beginning of the process, when you’re building lower resolution assets, they’re checked into Genesis. It’s a compounding effect, so every single thing you are then doing – including running cameras – is tracked in Genesis. If you’re moving around sets, that’s tracked. When you go on set and are now doing motion capture, that is being tracked into Genesis. It’s compounding. It’s tracking everything, which is huge because, from a data standpoint, as we’ve been making films, we’ve been getting data from all different places and trying to interpret it. What we’ve created is a centralised hub for all that information.” Shea gives an example: “The way we now have been working is, for instance, take an animated scene where the director of photography is running cameras on the scene. All of that is tracked, and we’re moving around set dressing as well. We record a take and that goes into editorial, so editorial have QuickTimes. It also has layouts, which then go to VFX. “For that initial animation stage in VFX, we’ve been allowing the director to change to a different angle if he wants to. That means taking that low-resolution animation back in to the engine and re- lensing it, which is really amazing. We’re able to do that, because we’re tracking everything through Genesis,” she says. MINIMISING VP Just when you thought virtual production was all about motion capture – with virtual characters and real actors mixing on big sets – there is now an alternative, as a side effect to all this tracking of data. “You can minimise this operation,” explains Shea. “Imagine a couple of people
ABOVE High-resolution screens are also part of the virtual production takeover
in a conference room, for instance. They could bring the material back into the engine and re-lens a shot right there in the room. That’s a big deal, a big change. And for us to then be able to put multiple systems into a rack-mounted case and transport this technology to different locations is really cool as well.” The danger for acquisition professionals is to retreat into what they know and have experience in, but people in the VFX industry want to partner with associations like the ASC and BSC – and probably others, too. They want to know what the challenges are for cinematographers, not interpret for them. They want collaboration. “There are obviously different languages that describe different disciplines,” admits Shea. “You could have a coder who talks to someone whose entire career has been on set using traditional film terms. We need a scatteration. We’re at the point in time now where the best way to improve the communication is to use film terms across the board – whether we’re working in CGI or working in live action. It educates people in VFX who are working in final pixels, and also invites all the live action disciplines – the cinematographers, the ADs, production designers – to the table. I’m a huge fan of using the film terms,” she concludes. Virtual production is a juggernaut of technology that cannot be uninvented or stopped. If you are (or going to be) working with VFX, it’s a massive opportunity to get involved at a ground-floor level.
A couple of people in a
conference room, for instance, could re-lens a shot right there in the room
62 DEF I N I T ION | MAY 20 1 9
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