ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE
Quite Brilliant’s next-gen LED screen delivers picture quality beyond any other stage in the UK S ince opening at Twickenham Film Studios last summer, Quite Brilliant has chalked up an impressive slate of productions – spanning features, adverts, music videos and social content – for clients including
volumes we’ve worked on before. We were prepared to invest more in this technology to ensure the quality stood out from other screens. We still have some SMD screens in the studio and when you put them side by side with the Samsung, you can really see the difference.” The same pursuit of perfection is also evident in the rest of the stage design. The volume incorporates both a curved and a flat section of LED wall, while overhead, a retractable LED ceiling measuring more than 100 sq m delivers up to 10,000 nits, giving productions enough level for convincing daylight work. There are also multiple wild walls, some with a 1.8mm pixel pitch, allowing them to be used as practical shooting surfaces where needed. They also sunk the LED wall below floor level – meaning no gap between floor and screen so productions don’t have to pay for extra staging. A permanent 6m turntable – ideal for car shoots – is built into the floor. Another common challenge in VP is a simple lack of floorspace and the time that it takes to set up and strike, which is effectively downtime for a production. By having two adjoining studios, both with LED screen options, Quite Brilliant can offer continuous shooting options that save customers both time and money. It also has four scalable packages that are based on screen size, so productions only pay for what they need, alongside a bespoke pop-up screen designed for second units and smaller shoots.
Warburtons, Bentley and Coke. A big part of the mission was to offer a truly ‘user-friendly’ service, helping to make virtual production (VP) accessible and affordable without compromising on quality. Having worked in the field since its earliest days (Quite Brilliant put on the first commercial VP demo in the UK), and operated a wide range of LED Volumes, the team came into the Twickenham build with a clear sense of the current challenges and how to address them. Pixel perfect Something they knew they had to nail was the quality of the LED screen. “Coming from VFX backgrounds, we always struggled with the fact that all the other screens have surface mounted pixels (SMD),” explains Russ Shaw, head of VP at Quite Brilliant. “No matter the pixel pitch, the standard LED screen cannot reproduce true blacks, especially when a lot of light is projected against the screens. This is why so much VP work has a slightly grey, milky look.” The Quite Brilliant team opted for Samsung panels, drawn in by the brand’s cutting-edge Micro LED tech. “The result is night and day compared to other screens,” enthuses Shaw. “We can achieve true blacks and it has a contrast ratio of 35000:1 which is 5x the other LED
More than just a stage Beyond the impressive infrastructure and tech stack, one of Quite Brilliant’s key USPs is the top-quality support it offers customers. “There’s so much more to VP than simply dry hiring the screen and building a few assets. It is about holding the client’s hand to help them get the very most out of VP,” stresses managing director Chris Chaundler. The team’s background in high-end production and VFX makes it well versed in working with production companies, agencies and brands, and the standards required. “We are all about collaboration and flexibility. Some clients require simple dry-hire and light-touch support, while others need a full service,” he continues. In practice, that often means involvement from early development through to shooting. For around 80% of projects, Quite Brilliant will create
50
DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM
Powered by FlippingBook