Last Wednesday me and my Virtual Production class had the privilege to have a conversation with the Virtual Production Producer for Dark Slope Vikram Verma hosted by our professor Eva Ziemsen.
It was a very productive conversation as Vikram told us about his career starting as an immersive media producer on theme parks to his current role at Dark Slope. He also gave us some insight on his day to day functions, going through client relationships to small examples of script breakdowns and how they can work for the better organization of the production, making sure the studio is able to achieve the vision of the director.
So I would like to thank Vikram for the generosity of sharing his knowledge, enabling me and my colleagues with a better view of how it is like being a VP Producer.
For traditional film people like me, animations and their making are often quite challenging and full of mystery, that’s why I consider myself very privileged to have attended a session with the CTO and Co-Founder of JALI Research Inc Pif Edwards earlier this week, and getting to know more about the groundbreaking 3D lip sync and facial animation software the company uses was very eye opening to learn more about the paths this giant industry is trailing.
It was fascinating to learn about their work in facial animation and how different it is from traditional motion capture techniques, for example, in the traditional way of doing it, you would need a studio equipped with mocap suits and cameras to capture the actors movements and expressions, whereas with JALI’s software you can animate a character straight out of the lines on the script without the need of motion capture.
Hearing Pif talk about their work on Cyberpunk 2077 because it was a feasible example of how that technology was applied in the gaming industry, which makes me think the future of the film and gaming industries are even more intertwined than it is now as the tools for digitalized story telling continue to evolve as time goes by.
So, thank you Pif Edwards for sparing the time for this amazing conversation with me and my classmates, thank you to Dr. Eva Ziemsen to arrange this meeting for us and to Alysha Whyte for connecting us to Pif.
I had a great time building this landscape environment on Unreal Engine 5.6 as a assignment for a class. It really shows the power of this software on how easily you can build a map like this not only in a short amount of time but also with little experience on it like I had at the time.
Creating a metahuman was such a fun experience, I felt like I was playing one of those RPG videogames like The Witcher or a sports videogame like Fifa and NBA 2K where you get to build your character in which I tend to spend more time than I should. First I did the facial 3D scan with help from one of my classmates using the Polycam app, then I sent the scan of my face (which was incredible by the way, thank you so much Vijay) to Blender to remove hair and clothes and then the rest of my face was sent to Unreal Engine to finish the build. In Unreal I got to play around with types of hair and facial hair and their multiple colors, and change every aspect of my face as a test. The only downside was that I could not figure out how to put glasses on my metahuman and since I wear those since I was three years old and often I can’t remember how my face looks without them, that part was a bit frustrating on my end.
It was also very interesting to see the facial expressions Unreal is capable of generating, which brought me back to the conversation my classmates and I had with Pif Edwards about his work on JALI Research Inc. and their facial animation techniques. Link for LinkedIn post
A few weeks ago my cohort and I had the amazing opportunity to visit the Virtual Production studio Immersion Room on a Tech Demo led by Mike Boers and Tanya Stemberger, the founders and co-CEOs of the company, to learn more about their technology and their work flow. We started the day with they telling us how the whole company came together in early 2020 when they were still developing their own tech and helping others on their technologies too, then Mike gave us a tour around the studio so we got to see everything up close which then he showed us the intricate details of the LED panels they have on their wall. What made my eyes shine about Immersion Room was their goal to make Virtual Production more accessible to independent filmmakers. They do it not only by charging amicable fees but by also developing their own technology like the Axiom processor, that was built specifically to be a LED processor that runs on consumer hardware, which Mike told us that they made by themselves. I believe that the extra amount of work they have done on this has paid off, since they seem to have very little to no delay on their frustrum while the camera moves, also this makes me think that developing your own tech makes troubleshooting a lot easier since at least in theory, it should be easier to spot problems that may happen on something that you build from scratch because you know all the specific details about it. It also caught my attention that although the Axiom is running on a very powerful computer, their render computers are very potent as well, but are still running on consumer components, which is another nod to making virtual production more accessible. It was also very cool to listen their Virtual Arts Department (VAD) team talk about their work flow with clients and how their works hours come together and how flexible those can be, which tells me that this is a company that cares about their workers well being, which nowadays has become rarer every day (at least in Brazil) with the culture of workers hyperexploration. During some point in the talks, they also mentioned that they once had a sixteen year old intern running the show as their VP Supervisor which tells me that they are open to giving new people opportunities, and those rarely come along in the film business so another nod to them for this. Overall it was a very exciting experience to see it all in person and seeing how a smaller studio like Immersion Room can still operate on a very high level due to them building their own things so it gives them more perception about limitations and troubleshooting and how united the team seems to be, and a crew that works well together tends to work more efficiently and faster. So I would like to thank Mike and Tanya for opening the doors to us and for our professor Dr. Eva Ziemsen to putting it all together. I know I learned a lot on that day and I know my classmates did so too.
As a part of the director’s annotation assignment to showcase how a movie could be done in ICVFX, I have chosen the 2008 movie Speed Racer, directed by Lilly and Lana Wachowski.
At the time the film came out, the cartoonish visuals weren’t well accepted by both critics and general audience which caused the film to flop badly in the box office generating an estimated loss of over 100 million USD to the studio. This mainly occurs because everything is on focus all the time on screen for the majority of the movie, which causes the image to not have depth of field. The way they shot these scenes consisted of filming the scene in layers, so you would first film the background, then whatever was in between the actors and the background and finally the actors, then they would either composite the image after during the editing process or shoot the actors on greenscreen. Where I think this movie could’ve benefitted from ICVFX is not only on the racing scenes since filming car scenes has become quite a trend for virtual production, but also the cartoonish looks of the film could benefit a lot from ICVFX with more polished images and more creative freedom for the director since you can make changes on the fly on Unreal Engine.
For editing this demo reel I started by choosing a song that would feel the closest to my roots, hence the samba music. While we were on pre pre-production stage I had the idea of taking a film camera on set to take some pictures with it and mix digital and celluloid, the only downside from it was that I didn’t have the opportunity of taking many pictures on the blue lagoon day due to my function being more hands-on. Overall editing this demo reel was a great experience and gave me a chance to have a little comeback to my background.
On our first day back in classes for this term, me and my Virtual Production cohort had the amazing opportunity to hear from Chris Krasek the Creative Director of Sportsnet hosted by our professor Dr. Eva Ziemsen. As a sports fan it was really eye opening to hear from Chris how Virtual Production can be implemented in broadcasts to make them not only more immersive but also even more entertaining while opening a big door for marketing with the use of augmented reality and virtual reality. During the talk, Chris noted that the sports viewership has changed a lot over the years and that efforts have to be done to captivate younger audiences, that is why it is important to note that the use of virtual reality can change the way we watch sports through the use of virtual insertions that could either be ads, shot clocks (like we see in the NBA when the shot clock appears close to the free-throw line), animations to make the broadcasting more appealing for younger audiences that or even the glowing hockey puck that happened in shots on American broadcasting of NHL games that helped viewers to see better where the puck was going and all that in real time. Chris also took his time to encourage us to put in the necessary work and effort to achieve our goals, a very necessary bit in times like these where the job market is very unstable and changing a lot, so thank you Chris for your time and knowledge shared and thank you Dr. Eva Ziemsen for making this connection happen.
During my graduation in film school, one of the courses that I liked the most was Multi Media Narratives which taught me about how the film industry nowadays is pivoting towards a transmedia experience that’s why the meeting we had with Jamie Hurcomb, an Academic Advisor on the Unreal Engine Education Team for Epic Games at Humber Polytechnic was very enlightening. During the talk, Jamie showed my cohort and I how this transmediality has been changing the job market for the entertainment industry and Epic Games is thriving in the middle of all that with Unreal Engine powering both the game and film industry with Virtual Production and ICVFX, showing once again how intertwined the future of both of these industries might be. The market is changing rapidly and although it still is a very expensive tool, with the constant development of generalist professionals, this should help lower budget productions to work on a more efficient set and on a longer term, help in the spreading of ICVFX, allowing more and more creators of multiple genres to achieve their vision. So I would like to say thank you to Jamie for this conversation helping us to catch a little peek on the future on this massive industry and how we can be a successful part of it and to Dr. Eva Ziemsen for hosting this amazing meeting.
Despite being a renowned equipment rental house, 2D House Inc also has an Virtual Production studio which earlier in February me and my cohort had the privilege to visit on a tech demo to get to know their Mirage ICVFX wall. The whole visit was very informative and we got to see how they operate a very efficient studio with a small crew using Assimilate Live FX as their software to run the wall. Thank you so much 2D House Inc for opening the doors to us, Evan Blacker the VP Producer and Director of Operations, VP supervisor and Volume Operator James Hughes and VP Specialist Conor McNeilly for giving us a walkthrough of the the studio, it’s always great to see how different LED volumes can be and how they can work for different goals and see what the job market expects from us students, and as always, thank you to Dr. Eva Ziemsen for arranging this day for us!
Visiting SP Studios at their tech demo earlier this month felt very welcoming for me and my cohort. We were given a tour of the studio by Adam Shone, the Virtual Production Supervisor and Studio Manager, who quickly started talking about methods of troubleshooting that were of great interest to us and it was nice getting acquainted with their workflow and to see that many problems that we had on set also happen on the professional level was very relieving, we just need to learn the proper ways of navigating around them. During our day there we also had the opportunity to see their team build a set for a shoot they were preparing, and it was very interesting seeing how they come up with solutions for lighting, camera movement and tracking, which we were told by Adam they use the Mo-Sys tracking a cutting edge mocap system that uses a sensor that captures reflective points around the studio to track the camera. There we were also introduced to Cait Salmon and Daniel Mosklov, their in house VAD and Technical Artists who very warmly gave us more insight into their routine and workflow in this fast growing and ever changing industry and also gave us tips on Unreal Engine plug ins such as DLSS for making high fidelity assets and Cesium for gathering location samples out of Google Maps, both of these that would be of great use to make the work on UE 5.7 not only faster but more realistic. So I want to say a huge thank you to SP Studios for opening their doors to us. It is always great to see cutting edge LED Volumes working and industry professionals. I would also like to thank Dr. Eva Ziemsen for making this amazing learning opportunity possible.
Recently me and my Virtual Production cohort had the privilege to have a chat with Dan Fill, co-founder and president of Dark Slope during our Business of Virtual Production course at Humber Polytechnic, and hearing what a studio chief has to say about the current state of the industry was very enlightening. It was very interesting to see how much he values working with original IP in a time where western cinema has been pivoting towards expanding pre-existing IP through endless sequels and reboots aiming to explore a multimedia way of narrative that on the long run, I find more prejudicial than helpful to filmmaking, and this effort on his side has been rewarded with the global phenomenon TV series Heated Rivalry. Dan talked a lot about how creating a positive on set culture can benefit the overall production, not just the ICVFX part of it and I might say that culture was very much felt when we had the chance to visit Dark Slope’s facilities at the end of last year for a tech demo. He also highlighted the importance of intergenerational integration between Gen Z and Gen X to develop and pave the future of Virtual Production, and it’s always relieving for me, a Gen Z, to hear about people in high ranking jobs that are aware that we should build and develop things for the future, not only for the past and present. Thank you Dan for taking the time to come and talk to us, and thank you Dr. Eva Ziemsen for arranging this meeting. I’m certainly looking forward to seeing what the future holds for Dark Slope.