[MUSIC PLAYING]
RUBEN GORISSEN: Unreal Engine, I think
most people know it from games like Fortnite,
but I quickly noticed that this is a tool that
can bring a certain level of quality
to create virtual production and visual effects.
I was always fascinated by how a game could
run real time while we were always
waiting for renders to finish, and that's a game changer.
BERNHARD SCHEPENS: Working on virtual events
seemed like a logical step.
ALAIN CORTHOUT: I was approached by [INAUDIBLE], which
is the largest Latin promoter in the world.
Their main thing was we want to be the first Latin festival who
does this, and we have to make this statement.
BERNHARD SCHEPENS: 2020 was the trigger to actually speed
that kind of production.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
JORIS CORTHOUT: Prismax is actually
a content-creation company for shows and concerts and artists.
We make the background visuals during a show,
during a concert, a fashion show.
RUBEN GORISSEN: Besides that, we also create
little tools that make life easier in the front of house.
That's where all the actual operators are coming together,
they're usually in the front of the stage,
and just to make life easier, like linking protocols
together.
It's that knowledge that helped us boost our production
workflow and what was later to come.
CELINE KRUIJS: Before COVID, our core business
was capturing events, livestream them, broadcast them.
ALAIN CORTHOUT: I used to travel too much
going to rehearsals, startups of new tours,
seeing a lot of people, a lot of artists.
Very exciting life.
RUBEN GORISSEN: 200 flights a year wasn't an exception.
It was a very turbulent lifestyle.
And then suddenly it just came to a complete halt.
GERD VAN GEEL: I had something like, [AUDIO OUT]
All our jobs, my jobs and my colleagues, their jobs,
were gone.
My agenda was completely empty in a few days.
JORIS CORTHOUT: First weeks felt like a genuine holiday,
and we thought, oh, it's going to pass.
It's going to be a few weeks, and then it's
going to be all right.
But it wasn't.
[LAUGHS] Not at all.
RUBEN GORISSEN: But then when all the summer
jobs got canceled and even postponed until next year,
we quickly noticed, OK, we really
need to evolve into another type of work.
CELINE KRUIJS: A couple of days after, we
were like, OK, what can we do, or what are we going to do?
Because we're not going to wait until this
is ending, not at all.
JORIS CORTHOUT: We had a lot of late-night chats
like, what are we going to do?
And then we were like, yeah, we got to find something
that we can do in this world.
And then we both like to play a computer game from time
to time.
It's in a virtual world.
So why not take whatever expertise
we have into the virtual world?
That was our main goal.
RUBEN GORISSEN: So we could create a new medium,
and Unreal Engine was the tool that we thought
suited best for us, yeah.
JORIS CORTHOUT: I was talking to the guys of Tomorrowland,
saying, hey guys, it's now March,
is your event going to happen?
Are you going to have a show, yes or no?
It wasn't quite clear yet how bad
this pandemic was going to be.
So I said, yeah, if it's not happening,
maybe let's do your festival in Unreal Engine.
They said, could you make a demo what it looks like?
And we created a demo I think in six days,
and that's what sold the virtual festival.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
RUBEN GORISSEN: There was a very big gap between the first demo
and the actual final product.
There were so many requests down the line,
and we were very motivated and very confident
that we would make sure that all those requests were handled.
Of course, we were hitting some limitations.
We were doing things that were never done before.
But the people at Epic were really
kind enough to supply some support when it comes to this.
I remember a call where even they said, OK, this
might be a little bit ambitious, but let's see
how far we can push this.
JORIS CORTHOUT: Well, for us, it was very important
that we create a virtual festival, but not
only a virtual festival that is there for the audience,
but also for the people in the event industry.
You have all these light guys, fireworks people,
show director.
They're all out of a job because of corona,
and they all have their own tools, their own software
and hardware that they normally use to operate a show.
So we actually created a bridge between Unreal Engine
and their tools.
They could use their tools that they always
use at the festival.
We take and record all that data.
We input it in the Unreal Engine.
The end result of their actions, their normal tools
are being output into our virtual festival.
ALAIN CORTHOUT: My role was being the stage and lighting
designer.
And as a project manager, I contacted
Prismax, who are pioneers in the whole creating
virtual environments for the music industry.
GERD VAN GEEL: Tecate Pa'l Norte is the first virtual festival
with live bands.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[SINGING]
One, two, one, two, one, two, three.
GERD VAN GEEL: We did a few virtual festivals
before, but only with live DJs, so this is a bit different.
RUBEN GORISSEN: It's a Mexican festival
which is a yearly festival being held in Monterrey
in a beautiful nature resort.
And the cool thing is that we recorded all these artists
in the same nature park that the normal festival would be held.
There's a huge arena there, and we built a custom Green Key
studio to make sure that all the artists were comfortable
and that it felt familiar.
For 12 days in a row, we recorded all the artists,
and later, all that content was being handled here in Belgium
back in our offices.
[SINGING]
Everybody go home.
JORIS CORTHOUT: So, what does it look like for us
to create a virtual festival?
First we think about how do we want this world to look like.
We go talk to the client.
We say, OK, what kind of world are you looking at?
And they told us, yeah, we really like the movie Avatar.
We really like that atmosphere.
So after these ideas are formed, we
start building these in Unreal.
Actually, before we even go into the studio,
we try to really finish these stages for 70%.
ALAIN CORTHOUT: For real events, we
design in visualization software.
Doesn't even come close to Unreal,
but it gives you an idea, a virtual idea,
of how things will look like.
But you always have to think ahead and say,
because in real life it will look like this
or when we are trying to design something
virtually for a real show.
For me, it was a bit new in this way
that I had to let go of all the reality.
So we had to create also features
without that would look like real features,
they should look like a science-fiction feature,
should look like something totally doesn't exist.
Drones with lights flying around,
impossible in real life.
And that would match the world better than putting real stuff
in there.
And that took some time.
This way of working has opened the door
to a world of limitless possibilities and creativity,
where before we were always limited
to the real-life limitations of technology.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
GERD VAN GEEL: So when I start, I
start to look at screenshots of the stages,
and then we make together with Ruben of Prismax a lot
of virtual shots, 32 per stage, so about 100 for the festival.
Then during the recording, I do a live edit
as well with the virtual cams and also with the live cams,
and I have to see that the atmosphere and the timing
of every movement is the same.
BERNHARD SCHEPENS: When you're shooting outdoors
on a festival, you need to have reliable cameras that
just continue working whatever weather we have.
Working on a virtual festival is totally different
because you're indoors in a studio
and you're working on the green screen environment.
So you need to have cameras that are really
good in providing that wide color gamut
and to be able to key it out.
To make this virtual environment really appealing
to the audience, we used manned cameras,
and the difficulty with manned cameras
is that they need to be tracked.
So we used optical tracking on those cameras.
What we've seen is that, one, the color gamut
is really important so we can key
it, and two is that every camera is
in sync, because the tracking of the cameras
needs to be spot on with the frames exactly.
So one of the cameras that did this the best
was the Sony VENICE.
We could lock it, we could remotely control it.
There is the Rialto extension system
that we can use to mount the lens on top and the body
and recorder somewhere else.
RUBEN GORISSEN: So what the big difference
between our previous jobs and this virtual festival
is that we were using a lot of dynamic light
and the Green Key studio, which is, as far as I know,
a big no-no [LAUGHS] in VFX, so we were using colored lights
on the artist to have a dramatic look
and still being able to key out the background from them.
But the fact that we would use a LED circle of about 8 meters
diameter and use that to light the artist on it
really adds to the integration of the virtual world
and the real physical footage.
CELINE KRUIJS: One of the things we
did to make it more like a real event,
we did some extra audio recordings.
The people who really react on something
that happened on stage or they did
a sing-along or they scream or they clap
their hands, things like that.
For us it was the extra layer to make it more real.
JORIS CORTHOUT: All these elements come together
into one big timeline.
We insert the footage, the keyed footage, into the scene.
We insert the cutting that the director made also directly
into Unreal Engine, and then we render out the final movie.
It's quite a bit of handling, but yeah,
once everything comes together, you really
have a frame sync show the way we intended to make the show.
RUBEN GORISSEN: How do you build a virtual festival
in Unreal Engine?
First of all, you start thinking about the concepts.
For Tecate Pa'l Norte, they really liked the idea of having
floating islands with lots of abstract elements.
There's a massive crowd here standing,
I think it's about 130,000 Actors.
So we create a lot of custom 3D assets
that have really high detailed modeling and shadows on it.
So we custom modeled the islands that the stages
would take place on.
The sites that we also use a lot of assets from the Marketplace.
The Marketplace is amazing to find custom assets just
to give like global ideas or mood boards
to quickly prototype something.
It's, of course, important that the client knows
what he's getting, so when it comes to Unreal,
I'm really happy that you can quickly
prototype in a matter of days and quickly prototype
a general idea.
And it's the quality, the immediate quality
that you get from it is a major plus for us
and helps sell the product even better.
There's no other tool that does it as well as Unreal,
so I'm really happy that we can do the preproduction
and post-production in Unreal and make sure
that everything is collected in one program and one engine that
does it all.
Show lights and DMX control is a key part
in making the show come alive, so we
spend a lot of time developing our own little workflow
within Unreal Engine to make sure that the lighting
operators can program their show the way
they wanted to within a real-time environment,
make sure the show looks as best as possible, and what you see
is what you get.
PIETER VAN ITTERBEEK: In the summer,
we used version 4.25, which was like the beta
for the old fixture library and fixture protocol.
But now 4.26 there is a lot of improvement.
They did ray marched beams, which looks a lot better
than the old beams, and they also
did some under-the-hood improvements, which only
benefited the render times.
JORIS CORTHOUT: So over the past festivals,
by now we've done three virtual festivals,
we've been developing our own custom fireworks system,
because that's what people like.
For Tecate Pa'l Norte, we've put the main stage full
of fireworks, and everything is put into a Sequencer
on the music.
And then everything explodes.
Because normally, for a real show, pyro is always--
there's a certain budget, money-wise,
and now we really don't have a budget.
We can fire as much fireworks as we want.
For our virtual festivals, we also
created our own festival crowd.
What we did is actually we took a few scanned people,
scanned persons, and we added motion-capture data to them.
And we created a Sequencer where we can actually change
the way they are dancing.
On rock music or Latin music, they
will dance in a completely different way
than on EDM music, and when the music gets more energetic,
they should dance, of course, harder than when there's
a slower part of the song.
PIETER VAN ITTERBEEK: So we're very
excited to see what else they can
bring for the future with the improvements.
Also because Unreal has a lot of custom things
you can do about it, with custom functions and custom notes.
It's really easy to make it your own
and make it the way you want it to be.
RUBEN GORISSEN: If you see the progress
that we've made a year since last summer,
it's crazy how far we've come and how many leaps we've
taken in quality and workflows.
We're literally making 30 hours of content
in a few months, which would be impossible without something
like Unreal Engine, I think.
GERD VAN GEEL: Bands or festivals
can create their own world in virtual environments
according to the music, their style of music,
or style of festival, so the sky's the limit.
And we can help them with our experience to make this happen.
ALAIN CORTHOUT: Epic and Prismax have
built a bridge between music and event industry and the gaming
industry.
It's not going to go away.
This is going to stay.
I think for the future there is a place
for both virtual and real-life events,
because artists can use the virtual as a promotional tool.
They can do an event and go global
in a very short time, while if you have to launch a tour,
it's a very lengthy process and a very expensive process.
JORIS CORTHOUT: I think for the future,
I'm really looking forward of using
Unreal Engine in live shows.
Right now we can't do them, so we
are limited to virtual shows.
I think that's the next step for our event industry.
BERNHARD SCHEPENS: I'm happy to explore
a lot more of productions in Unreal Engine.
I think it's here to stay.
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