Productions Embrace LED Walls as Necessary in Pandemic Times

When the pandemic hit, productions scrambled to figure out logistics in the new normal. That’s when studios turned to an emerging aspect of virtual production: digital immersive environments capturing real-world settings (including lighting) rendered in real time using game engines such as Unreal. They are then projected onto LED walls made up of hundreds of high-def displays that serve as interactive backdrops for actors — like a green screen, but much more sophisticated.To get more news about OUTDOOR LED SCREEN, you can visit htj-led.com official website.

It’s said that necessity is the mother of invention, but in truth, VFX shops have been dabbling in different aspects of virtual production for years — with techniques being notably applied on pics such as Steven Spielberg’s “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” in 2001.
Given the restrictions on travel and social distancing regulations at many locations, however, the pandemic inadvertently sped up, specifically, the utilization of LED walls — given that only small crews, using cameras fitted with sensors that can track changing perspectives, are needed to capture the plates for the shots on location. These emerging tools became a necessity.

COVID really accelerated the willingness to investigate this approach. It was cool and sexy before, but then it became practical and the only alternative,” says Demian Gordon, president and founder of the Motion Capture Society and a virtual production supervisor with credits that include the second and third Matrix films, “Polar Express” and the “Planet of the Apes” franchise.

“The technology is still in its infancy because it’s a relatively new approach; it’s very expensive,” Gordon says.

Productions are essentially taking signage that’s meant for displaying advertising or big TV images outdoors and repurposing it to be used on a film stage. “It’s not exactly meant to do what it’s being asked to do.”

But manufacturers quickly realized they could embrace this new market and are starting to deploy technologies to solve some of the existing issues, namely: cost, weight, how far apart the LEDs are spaced, how far they need to be from the wall, the time it takes to transmit the image to the LED wall, display resolution, LED brightness, how quickly they strobe, heat, and so on.

“People are just getting their sea legs with how to deal with this new toolset.”

Industrial Light & Magic made a lot of headway in the realm of virtual production tools on “The Mandalorian.”

“Our LED technology is really an outgrowth of work that we have been doing with LEDs for rear projection screens with pre-rendered content,” says ILM’s executive producer of virtual production, Chris Bannister. “We had done that on things like ‘Rogue One’ and ‘Solo,’ and then when ‘The Mandalorian’ came along, and Jon Favreau has done so much virtual production work on ‘Lion King’ and ‘The Jungle Book,’ it became kind of a perfect marriage of the technology work that ILM was doing and pushing it forward into the latest evolution. We took the latest in real-time rendering technology, camera tracking, and motion capture and put them together to make something that really hasn’t been achieved before.”