Turn up the Volume: What Next for Virtual Production?

Virtual production isn’t the novelty that it perhaps was during Cannes Lions 2022 - not only is it becoming increasingly familiar for agencies and brands, but AI is also about to truly… well… turn up the volume. 

Big brands are using it to transform their marketing, produce bigger ideas, reduce their carbon footprint and, yes, save money. Marketing teams are racing to block book facilities and holding companies are stepping up with their own volume studios, and it is up-ending traditional production and VFX pipelines.

Eyvonne Carfora, executive producer, Alt.vfx, Krystina Wilson, executive vice president of advertising, Framestore US, Mathieu Nevians, creative director, BETC/Havas, Melania Kulczycka, client director, VuFinder Studios, Steffen Gentis, global production director, MCA / Reckitt, and Wesley ter Haar, founder, MediaMonks all represent businesses that have been using virtual production in a big way. They spoke as part of a panel discussion today at the Little Black Book & Friends Beach, revealing how to make the most of it, what virtual production isn’t suitable for and where its future lies. 

But, is virtual production the start of something incredible? “Yes, although I think everyone on stage has been introduced for quite a while,” said Wesley. “I think virtual production meets generative AI - sorry for saying AI - I think that opens up the aperture of opportunities. So that to me feels like we’re getting to the next level of virtual production.”

Steffen Gentis agreed - he said that a year ago MCA and Reckitt were at the acceleration phase for virtual production but now AI has kicked everything up several gears. “There’s this new game-changing technology that is suddenly making total sense because, you know, if you think about it from a brand perspective, we want to harness AI in the smartest possible way. You cannot harness AI at a physical location, but the moment you’re working in a digital environment, it opens up limitless creative possibilities, and that’s the really exciting thing.”

Coming round the corner is the ability to create real time worlds using prompts, allowing creators to build and tweak scenes on set.

In the past two years, as more clients and agencies have been taking baby steps into virtual production, what’s become clear is that it has also unlocked a new way of collaborating and they’re starting to see a broader range of stakeholders embrace that. “People realise that it’s not just working on an LED volume or it’s not just about the backgrounds, it’s about developing the creative far ahead of time,” said Krystina.

Eyvonne Carfora was keen to point out that virtual production has to be used for a specific reason and it is not always the cheaper alternative for any given project.

“From my experience with our clients, their preferences. There’s always a reason as to why virtual production is the best tool for that concept. I wouldn’t necessarily essay because it’s cheaper, because that’s not necessarily true at the moment. For example, if you have so many different locations and then it makes sense, or if you’re creating a new world, then it makes sense. For us in Australia, it’s educating the agency, the agency producers and the clients.”

Where it does get interesting for clients, though, is when you can scale up your use of virtual production, as Wesley said. “You can move a lot of business at scale to more virtual production. I do think clients look at it as a tool and I think initially maybe it felt a bit too nerdy and fetishistic about the tech, and it was quite difficult for the clients to have it land. So that’s where the generative AI part has an xxx because that pipeline makes the work more powerful and easier. So we’re seeing that be the unlock for people to get past.”

That scale can be reached with a ‘bundling’ approach – where a company shoots a number of projects together in a block of several weeks or months. It’s an approach that can result in incredible efficiency. Melania said, “Because we have everything planned in advance, we can reuse, for example a sofa that’s used on the first day of the commercial, on another. We can do that with assets and we can also do it with props. Why is it so cost effective? Because we can negotiate very good prices with their suppliers, so that they know they have work for two or three months.”

There’s the sustainability angle too - Reckitt has seen a significant reduction in the carbon footprint of its productions. “A couple of years ago it was okay to smoke in aeroplanes, right? Today it is impossible to imagine. I think in ten years time we’re going to think the same way about shooting films on location. We were travelling to all four corners of the earth, three times a year flying in people from everywhere,” said Steffen.

That’s not to say that virtual production is the be-all and end-all, and there will still be a need to escape the volume for certain kinds of projects that require cinematic scope or documentary storytelling. Moreover, as Wesley pointed out, in the film and TV space, virtual production may have pushed a certain kind of static and stilted filmmaking, though it’s something that may be less of an issue for advertising. That being said, for the sort of jobs where creativity has been hemmed in as a result of budgets, virtual production has empowered agencies to think bigger.

“Before the virtual studios, we thought about the budgets, before we thought about the ideas. Now I can set my creatives free and you can make a lot of possibilities. You can be in Mexico at sunrise,” said BETC/Havas’s Mathieu.

As a constantly evolving technology, virtual production has moved on significantly since it first came on the scene in terms of hardware, software and even new kinds of talent and job roles emerging, like AI director. Keeping up with that evolution is no mean feat and not cheap but what’s clear is that, although virtual production has reached a new stage in its development, we’re still very much in the foothills.