We saw a glimpse of it with the StageCraft featurette back in November, and now finally a behind-the-scenes featurette about the use of the technology in “The Mandalorian” TV series has gone online.
ILM’s StageCraft makes use of space in Manhattan Beach Studios in Los Angeles called ‘The Volume’, a large soundstage surrounded by high-quality 270-degree semicircular LED video wall 20 feet high and 75 feet wide displaying a virtual landscape image rendered in the Unreal gaming engine.
The tech is linked to the camera used, changing the light and parallax of the image as the camera moves – allowing for a convincing illusion that can be shot ‘in camera’. Elaborate vistas of all kinds can be adjusted on the fly by technicians on hand using basic computers and tablets who can alter the landscape and change the weather and lighting conditions fairly easily whilst at the same time lighting the subjects in the foreground.
Combined with practical set props, more than 50% of the show’s first season was filmed using the tech which eliminated the need for time-consuming location shoots entirely. Some small location shoots in Death Valley and Chile did take place to photograph and rebuild exotic locations in the computer using the imagery captured.
Environments were first created in VR in pre-production, and then turned over to the ILM VFX team to create fully photo-realistic completions while also assuring performance in a game engine on set during production. ILM also did some model building and photography passes on those to help generate CG versions with proper textures.
StageCraft is a partnership of tech giants such as Fuse, Lux Machina, Profile Studios, NVIDIA, and ARRI, and ILM with the plan to make it available as an end-to-end virtual production solution to the industry so expect more films to utilise it in coming years.
