A new state-of-the-art virtual production studio has launched in Norwich, the result of a collaboration between Norwich University of the Arts and Sony.
The studio will be the first educational and commercial facility of its kind in the UK to feature not only Sony Verona panels for virtual production, but also a Sony Venice camera to capture content.
Sony said: “The virtual production studio places Norwich at the forefront of digital storytelling and next-generation filmmaking in the UK. It gives creators and performers the ability to perform in front of Sony’s LED-based screen, providing immersive backdrops in real-time.
“These digital sets can transport actors and audiences to any location imaginable and are widely used in major blockbusters and news productions.
“At nine metres wide and four metres high, the LED volume uses 6.7 million pixels to deliver sharp, cinematic visuals that look lifelike both in person and on camera.”
The studio is located alongside the university’s Immersive Visualisation and Simulation Lab, which is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
The combined studio forms a new hub for digital creativity and will be used by students studying film, animation, games and visual effects, as well as for commercial purposes, as directors will be able to rent out the space for their own projects.
On Wednesday (12 November), British Cinematographer stopped by the launch event to check out the facilities and talk to Sony staff and NUA teachers and students about them.
You can read what they had to say below.
Jon Driscoll – Cinematography lecturer at NUA
On the project:
“This project was supported by the Office for Students, so it is really focused on enhancing the students’ learning. It’s all about getting them into the industry more prepared for the new technologies that we’re facing. We’ve introduced it to our second and third years, and they’ve absolutely loved the experience.
“Lighting design is a very big part of the way I work, and this has been absolutely amazing for lighting simulation. Imagine if you’re teaching lighting to students, and you want to say, ‘Okay, we’re going to set something in the forest. Let’s give them some visual stimulus to say that this is a forest background, and now let’s evoke the texture of the light that comes from that imagery.’ It is an amazing VP facility for running through those things.
“What’s also been really great is teaching our cinematographers how to position the camera and to shoot in a way that’s makes sense of the orientation of the LED volume, teaching them things like shot, reverse shot. This helps them to manipulate how a camera will work against different backgrounds, but it also helps orientate their location filmmaking, because they’re suddenly having to really picture how different backgrounds and frame composition will affect different shot types. As a lecturer, it’s just so interesting.”
On the facilities:
“We’ve got a Sony Verona – 2.31mm pitch for the in vision screen; it’s the slightly less dense pitch tile. And the screen is 9 x 4m, the resolution is 4K.
“That’s complemented with the image-based lighting ceiling piece , which is manufactured by a company called AOTO. We wanted a product that would work really well mounted on a ceiling. Also, we wanted to specify a ceiling that replicated natural light, that could also function as a beautiful top light. The solution was a RGBW tile that rendered a higher CRI and was more compatible with our existing ARRI lighting fixtures, SkyPanels and the like. We also have a roving floor section of AOTO SW5.7C which we will use to teach reflections and image-based lighting.
“It’s just great to be able to give the students a top light which is really safe and easy to use. We can mask it down to shapes, we can mask something out if you don’t want it to be seen. It’s really liberating for learning, and, of course, great for the reflections and the shadows and so on.
“It’s important to me to teach cinematic lighting. We had a limited budget for the lighting, so it was a case of, what can we get? It had to be a basic rig where we can teach three-point, we can teach all of the classic cinema styles, and we can use them with backgrounds. We could switch off that image-based lighting element and light scenes traditionally, asking the students to use their imaginations to light dimensionally to create depth.
“We’ve got roving lights. We can bring them on the floor for the students, everything’s pole operated, so we can remote access that. Then we’ve got a lighting console so that we can access all of the advanced features of the ARRI L7-C Plus Fresnels, which have great RGBW colour mixing.
“I can’t tell you how much it has changed the way that our students work. They’ve become so professional. As soon as you situate them in what feels like a professional studio, they just mature. They become professionals. And I’ve seen that happen in six weeks. It’s been a really rich experience.”
Elliot Marris – Technical solutions specialist at Sony
“We’ve got a whole bunch of individual technologies stacked together to make all this possible. The goal of virtual production is, of course, to have more control over the whole creative process. And what we’re able to do using this type of technology together is to put subjects, whether it’s a car or people, into environments that either don’t exist or that are hard to access.
“The emphasis is very much on sustainability in production. Impact on the environment and travelling to locations is one of the biggest challenges in the industry, and one great application of this type of technology is that we are able to take this take this car and put it back in the desert that it raced in without actually going to that desert and disrupting that environment, and disrupting the nature of the wildlife of that environment, with on-location shooting.
“To make all this work, and to make this illusion that you’ve seen with the screen work, lots of technologies have to be very high quality and linked to each other in exactly the right way. The LED wall has a very specific type of construction, which allows it to achieve very, very deep blacks, but also extremely bright colours and overall brightness. That’s really critical for making the illusion work, because what you want to be able to do is control exactly how that background looks, so that it looks as real as the real set in front of it. That’s where the LED technology of Sony really comes into play.
“We’re able to throw more light into our scene. We’re able to build the set right into the edge of the screen, because our LEDs are resin set so they’re not going to get damaged by this type of set design, and we get a much more convincing look onto the final picture.
“The camera moves around and the image on the wall is actually reacting to that, and that is the secret sauce that makes virtual production really work. It’s really important that when the camera moves, the image that it’s capturing on the screen is projected in the right perspective. So as the camera moves around, the mountains and the plants in the background shift backwards and forwards across the screen, and they’re reacting to the movement of the camera. That enables us to get dynamic movement in the shots, which, again, blends in that immersive visual.
“This is something which is typically quite difficult to do in a traditional green screen environment, because, of course, in green screen, you can’t see the virtual environment you’re framing against. So on a creative level, virtual production opens up possibilities, but also streamlines possibilities, because everybody on the production, from the director all the way through to the editors, the camera operators, the actors, they can all see exactly what they’re working with.”
Liam Sankey – Third-year NUA student
“The facilities are very exciting. I think having something like this is incredibly helpful for when you get out of uni. Getting to know how to use it, getting all the facts and processes locked down, is incredibly useful heading into the professional world.
“We all recently shot a noir-inspired monster project, which was pretty cool. We set the backdrop to some clouds – the best thing about the production studio is that you can move the lighting wherever you like, so this little, tiny moon we had, we were moving it around to where we wanted it, and then we basically let the scene be motivated by that moon. It’s an incredibly insightful window into how you can just build on a set and you can have it exactly how you envision it.
“Virtual production is used in a bunch of different projects. I was talking about The Mandalorian earlier. Disney uses it all the time. These stages are so incredibly popular nowadays for having that realism – as actors, especially in a space like this, if it’s physically there, you can act with it, which is incredibly helpful. If you can’t get to a location that’s abroad, or if you want to avoid hurting the environment on location, they’re places that are ethically correct and you can do whatever you like in a space without harming anybody.”
