Article by Beth Marchant, Randi Altman’s Post Perspective, 20th of July, 2022
“Although it might seem like a newer phenomenon, virtual filmmaking has been quietly idling on the sidelines of film and TV production for a very long time. In tech circles, it has been called many things and taken many forms. It’s been used for everything from simple, one-off shot setups like The Matrix‘s “bullet time” sequences to entire films, like James Cameron’s Avatar. Both of these examples were groundbreaking at the time, both technically and culturally. But few really understood what virtual production could mean to the industry as a whole.
When Jon Favreau’s live-action masterpiece The Mandalorian burst into the world with Disney+ in 2019, suddenly everyone and their brother knew what virtual production was and had the broader potential to do.
Even as virtual production is more widely adopted, many misconceptions about the still-evolving platform persist — namely that virtual production only makes sense for those with the biggest budgets. As ILM and Dimension Studios show here, there are many ways to scale a virtual stage. Virtual production is, above all, about flexibility, as suitable and scalable for short-form commercial spots and virtual sports avatars as it is for TV series and big-budget movies.
ILM StageCraft leads the way
If you’d asked anyone 10 years ago if visual effects powerhouse Industrial Light & Magic would one day transform TV, they might have answered, “Isn’t making billion-dollar movies enough?” The trailblazing studio founded by George Lucas and now a subsidiary of Disney has largely pioneered and dominated the category in tentpole films for nearly 50 years. ILM is legendary for its R&D, having given us everything from film scanning, motion control and morphing to in-camera effects and Photoshop. (ILM COO John Knoll was one of Photoshop’s original creators.) Is it any wonder that when the streaming revolution and pandemic upended Hollywood production, ILM was there to meet the new demand for effects-heavy content?” Click to continue
SOURCE:
Randi Altman’s Post Perspective: https://postperspective.com/the-evolution-of-icvfx-ilm-stagecraft-and-dimension/
