ORLANDO, Florida — The building for Vū Orlando looks like the rest of the office park off John Young Parkway. But inside, past the lobby and the green room, lies another world, or rather, infinite worlds.
A massive LED screen – 26 feet tall and 155 feet long – wraps around three sides of Vū’s Stage 1 sound studio. Known as a volume, the screen immerses anyone standing inside it in green-peaked mountains or a vast alien desert or a fictional city found only in the imagination.
“With virtual production, whatever you dream … it’s possible in this environment,” said Vū co-founder and president Jon Davila.
Vū, who opened its Orlando studio in September, is the latest player in virtual production, a relatively new method of film production that replaces green screens with huge displays that can be shot and edited in real time.
But it isn’t just a picture on a screen. Virtual production merges video game and film technology to render clear environments that react to cameras and actors the way the real world does.
“The production world is all upside down with this tech,” said Rick Ramsey, education director of visual arts at Full Sail University in Winter Park.
In 2020, the commercial production company Davila had started in Tampa out of high school, Diamond View Studios, was losing work because of the pandemic.
Then Davila saw a behind-the-scenes look at the “Star Wars” show “The Mandalorian,” which did the majority of its shooting in front of a volume.
“We said that was the future right there,” he said. “We needed to figure out how to offer virtual production to the commercial world.”
Every person interviewed for this story independently brought up “The Mandalorian” as the introduction to virtual production. Ramsey said some of the technologies used had been around for more than a decade, but the quality of the hit Disney+ show was turning point in the industry.
“That’s when it became really well known,” he said.
Vū has built four studios in the past two years, including in Tampa, Las Vegas and Nashville. Orlando was the last to open, and with three sound stages and 8,000 square feet, it is the largest in the portfolio.
“We took everything we learned at our other studios and put it here,” Davila said.
Virtual production offers benefits over traditional location shooting. For one thing, it’s all indoors, so it isn’t affected by weather, crowds or the position of the sun.
“We can place the sun where we want,” Ramsey said. “All your reflections – even glass – are going to look realistic because they’re reflecting the environment.”
Keeping shoots to a single location saves productions money, although the upfront costs for a volume can be substantial. Vū did not provide a dollar amount for its studio, but screens even a third of this size can cost up to $1.5 million , according to a story in the Sydney Morning Herald.
It’s not like shooting on any other set, where backdrops and photographs are static when a camera pans over them.
In virtual production, a video game engine tracks the motion of the camera to create effects such as parallax scrolling, where objects that are supposed to be farther from the camera move slower than objects in the foreground.
“If you can take your camera’s movement and coordinates and put them into the game engine, the game engine can then put up on the screen exactly what the camera should be seeing,” Ramsey said.
Video game engines allow directors to custom design interactive landscapes on a scale that wasn’t possible even with other forms of digital art.
“When game engines were designed, they were designed to have a lot of pliability for artists when creating environments,” Ramsey said.
Davila says he continues to be amazed at the way directors who rent his studio are utilizing the volume.
“Every shoot is an ‘Oh wow,’” he said. “Our studios have become this creative venue. You see other directors and other companies … their creative abilities max out.”
In its short time open, Vū Orlando has already produced car commercials, music videos and an ESPN show. Viewers would never guess that an ad featuring real horses walking through stormy wasteland was shot in the same place as a boat commercial.
Vū’s studio in Las Vegas was recently used as a shooting location for the upcoming Nicolas Cage film “Speak of the Devil.”
Learning how to combine these technologies and use them all at once, however, is a challenge for volume operators such as Vū’s George Bobbio. “When I first started, I thought it would be easy,” Bobbio said. “It is not. At all.”
Bobbio, who started his career making 3-D animation for commercials, said mastering the process of virtual production is “a whole other monster” from anything else he had done. “This is being a 3-D artist, being a technician, being a cameraman,” he said. “It’s a little bit of everything.”
Virtual production offers benefits beyond a stable shooting location. In green screen production, actors have to imagine a world that is added in later. Here, they can see whatever environment they need.
More than that, a director can edit effects on the screen in real time to see how they look with the actor. “You’re going to do a lot of work with effects up front, not at the end,” Ramsey said.
The tech isn’t limited to film. Falcon’s Creative Group in MetroWest, which designs theme park attractions, uses different forms of virtual production and video game tracking software to build and test rides before they go into production.
Falcon’s tech projects environments onto the walls and then tracks users to create an interactive space.
“It allows us to visualize an attraction space that does not exist,” said Saham Ali, Falcon’s executive vice president of technology. “We can work out details that normally, unless you’re there on site, you don’t know it’s going to be a problem.”
As technology improves, Ramsey foresees virtual production bringing in other aspects of modern filmmaking. Someone could be filming a digital character with motion capture in one studio, and the character could appear live on the volume in another, “letting the actors act into the effect rather than pretending it’s there as you do with green screen,” said Ramsey.
Ramsey said the real key to the spread of virtual production is education. “It is one thing to train people in this technology,” he said. “It is another to retrain people who have been using older technology.”
Lindsey Sandrin, general manager for Vū Orlando, said education is one of the reasons the company chose a location in Orlando, as it is in close proximity to Full Sail and the DAV School as well as simulation companies such as SIMCOM opening offices in the city.
“There’s not really another market with this amount of schools and supporting companies that teach this stuff,” Sandrin said. “The talent is here.”
