Q - How has the industry evolved and what do you see as the biggest challenges and opportunities today?

A - Over the past twenty-five years or so our industry of digital effects and color grading has gone from a single workstation approach to a process in which many people collaborate to create. It’s magnificent to be a part of that.

We currently see what used to be separate departments merge together. For example, pre-vis, tech-vis and post-vis which were all separate ways to find answers to production questions are now in the process of collaborating together in Virtual Production.

Today, digital filmmaking allows us to do the same things in the virtual environment as traditional filmmaking does on set. It creates a stage-like environment where filmmakers can realize their vision in a way not previously possible.

We are continuously coming up with new tools to make things more efficient, more collaborative and more creative.

In Virtual Production, we seek to meet and exceed the live action paradigm and then go further by making it more interactive, making something that feels very familiar to filmmakers but that allows them to interact with digital environments.

 

Q - You are heading the Virtual Production department within Technicolor’s new Pre-Production studio. How does virtual production help storytellers bring their visions to life?

A - Virtual production allows a new vision in the digital filmmaking process. It’s not that we haven’t worked together across departments before, it’s the immediacy that’s the differentiator, allowing filmmakers to interact with digitally created objects and characters in real-time. It brings the live action set experience into the digital realm.

Through virtual production, Directors who have not previously been exposed to digital workflows find the digital paradigm very familiar and very relatable to what they are used to. It helps them make more informed creative decisions and puts them in the driver’s seat in telling their story.

Its analogous to the advent of digital cameras. Before digital cameras, we shot the footage and then sent it to the lab, and the next day we could see what we had shot looked like. With digital cameras we could see our footage immediately. In the same way that digital cameras allow immediate review of shots, virtual production allows us to create high end images in real-time so we can see straight away if we got the shot, or if we need to go again.

 

Q - What are the risks or consequences of not embracing the power of virtual production, and continuing to do things business as usual?

A - Ultimately, we would lose the ability to be innovative in enhancing the creative approach to projects.

Virtual production is about establishing what is happening in a digital environment between sets and characters and finding the right lensing. But, it’s also about extending the real time workflow to the workstations of individual artists. Animators will be working more in real time as well so their work can focus even more on performances rather than waiting for offline renders to judge the action. Creative work can now more easily be driven from an emotional state rather than from the technical side. We even foresee that elements on the big screen in a colorist’s suite will still be active in-engine and be able to be adjusted and manipulated to create the best image possible in the context of an entire sequence or project.

Virtual production allows the ability to increase creativity and to have a huge impact on digital storytelling.

 

Q - How does Technicolor Genesis differ from what others in the industry are offering, or how virtual production has been done in the past, and how will this benefit storytellers?

A - I like to compare Genesis to the evolution from a traditional film strip to a digital file sequence. When film and VFX went digital we suddenly had to track millions of individual assets and files that make up our final picture. Genesis is that glue, that platform, that allows us to visualize our work and hold all these files together in the virtual filmmaking process.

One of the bigger changes we’re going through at the moment, is the elimination of having to create the same asset multiple times throughout our production process. Through our new approach to digital filmmaking we want to create any asset only once and then evolve it throughout the production process. We grow it from its basic version up to its final version. We also can bring assets that are almost ready for final rendering back into engine to maybe put another camera angle on them. It allows a tremendous amount of flexibility. It makes digital filmmaking a non-linear process, when we can bring assets from post-production back into Virtual Production to make changes, do a new take or whatever is needed creatively. Genesis tracks all of that, holds it all together and that’s its power.

In the future, productions will spend more time in the early stages of production to create environments and characters that can be viewed in engine. Overall our digital production process now more closely follows the live action paradigm.

 

Q - As head of Virtual Production within Technicolor’s new Pre-Production studio, what are you most excited about for the future of storytelling?

A - I’m absolutely excited that Technicolor is committed to virtual production as we are embedded into the mindset of filmmaking. The history of filmmaking that is in our company’s DNA and the fact that we can now extend our playing field from the very early stages of pre-production across all aspects of the filmmaking process to final color correction is an extremely exciting idea.

We are laying the groundwork for the new fabric of how we’re going to create and experience movies in the future.