Remote Control VIRTUAL PRODUCTION PROGRAMME

The Screen Industries Growth Network (SIGN), in collaboration with Prox & Reverie and Screen Yorkshire offered up an opportunity for three SMEs to supercharge their understanding of Virtual Production, using one of their existing projects as a practice platform to develop critical understanding of the creative and commercial value of virtual production and real-time technologies.

I paired up with Producer Thea Burrows on a story I have been developing, and together, we have been exploring Virtual Production’s [VP] range of techniques and approaches, software tools and techniques to enable us to combine live-action footage and computer graphics in real-time. So far it has been an intensive hands-on workshop at Prox & Reverie’s state-of-the-art immersive studio, The Forge, whereupon we have been learning more about how VP can support cost savings for TV and film productions and accelerated time to market, whilst unlocking new workflows and techniques, and new creative possibilities for the story itself.

We have also discovered changes within workflows, that bring much of the production process up the content creation pipeline to the pre-production stage, which is where we will be focusing our efforts for the remainder of this opportunity - using VP to demonstrate how virtual technology tools can help in visualising the creative ambition of a project before it reaches the filming stage of production.

This particular aspect of VP has been helpful in these early stages of development as it means creative teams can collaborate earlier as well as help to communicate the creative vision more directly for stakeholders and funders looking to commission film and television projects into production.

By the end of the programme, we hope to have not only learned skills and knowledge to take our vision further using Virtual Production techniques but we hope to have produced a suite 3D assets and reference materials that can be presented in a pitch package and that can move directly into the production process.