How does virtual production work?

In short, virtual production is when we shoot commercials against the backdrop of screens. If it is expensive to drag an actor to Africa, then virtual production comes to the fore - we buy videos from the Sahara on stock, put the actor in front of the big screens, and shoot - voila, our actor is already in Africa.

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In our project, there was not Africa, but megacities from different parts of the world. Instead of an actor - cars. Despite the tight preparation of the project, we encountered several surprises.

Wiring

Our screen consisted of dozens of smaller screens connected to one large canvas. When we built everything tightly and started testing, it turned out that one screen did not give a picture. The problem was banal - a broken register to the screen. Replaced, but lost time.

Stock videos

For filming, we bought the backgrounds we needed for the screen. But when setting up cars and cameras, it seemed that a couple of shots didn’t fit in any way. The motion vector inside the purchased videos did not match the motion of our camera. We had to look for a replacement in parallel with the shooting of other scenes. Here we had to take the purchased shots for shooting and only after the shooting to buy licenses for those that finally suited us.

Color correction

Cellular footage still needs to be shown to the project's color editor. Some will need to be colored before pasting into the background. We had several frames that differed greatly in color (briefly: the background is faded, the front is contrasting). In post-production, we had to separately select and color the background using masks.

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By the way, we saved a lot of money on this project: in general, delivery, setup, and maintenance of such screens is an expensive business. But we matched the timing with contractors in such a way that we started filming after colleagues who also rented screens. But not without a share of luck, we had to look for such shootings, after which the contractors were not booked and the studio was free. Minus spending on logistics and technicians, which is minus 30% of the budget :)

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