[MUSIC PLAYING]
LOUISE BAKER LEE: Honestly, the moment
that the black screens come alive with the environment,
and the artist in front of it is a little bit mind-blowing.
RICH LEE: We just completed two music videos for Jackson Wang.
One's called Cruel, and one is called Come Alive.
I got the track for Cruel, and they knew
they wanted it to take place in the apocalypse.
CHRISTOPHER PROBST: So it was an ambitious concept.
Typically, that would be relegated to a VFX-heavy green-screen shoot
and a very lengthy post-production schedule to execute that.
RICH LEE: We just happened to be, at the time,
putting together our virtual production stage.
The planets aligned, and it was a great opportunity for us
to jump into the deep end of virtual production.
CHRISTOPHER PROBST: From a cinematography standpoint,
I had a certain checklist of what I would
hope to achieve in a volume space that
would give me the freedom to move the camera anywhere I wanted.
One of those requirements was having full resolution on the ceiling.
So we devised a solution where we had inside-out tracking.
We had a sensor on the camera and little IR reflectors in the ceiling.
So we had this perfect transition of the ceiling and the wall.
So I could put a camera low.
And I could point up and not have to worry about the post-production end
of that.
RICH LEE: So it's two big environments that
needed to look good almost in 360.
Because a lot of the video is long, hand-held oners.
We had under two weeks.
So we had to build the environments and then get them on the stage
and start to test.
LOUISE BAKER LEE: It was kind of a kit-bashing dream.
Using Unreal, we were able to harvest from the Marketplace
and from our vast library of assets and make something really gigantic
that we wouldn't have been able to do any other way.
CHRISTOPHER PROBST: When we first brought up
the post-apocalyptic environment fully dressed
with all the rubble and car husks, the look on their faces
was just awe.
And they couldn't believe what they were seeing.
Trying to figure out where that line of demarcation from the actual set
was and what the wall was, when you have
that horizon line really dressed, what is real, and what is fake?
Even more so when I have it up through the lens.
And when they saw the first shot, it was game on.
It was like, oh, oh, OK, wow.
LOUISE BAKER LEE: I don't think I was prepared
for how great it was going to look and work, especially through camera.
CHRISTOPHER PROBST: One of the joys of actually working
in virtual production is that you can put the camera anywhere
you want and find shots.
It's not like it's a prescribed "we're doing this angle,"
and there's a budget to do the compositing and the roto
and the tracking.
It's fair game.
You can create as many shots as you want
without adding any more expense than just being on the stage,
to begin with.
LOUISE BAKER LEE: If this particular angle doesn't look great,
or if there's some piece of architecture
that you want to just get in frame, it's easy, right?
And you just move a 20-story building 100 feet, and it works.
CHRISTOPHER PROBST: There was a lot of handheld,
so the choreography of the camera was as important as the dancers.
And then everything else was just natural, that we move the camera,
and we're seeing the environment, and it looks great.
And know that they have it in camera.
RICH LEE: Every take, every take, the dancers and Jackson
would come to check out what they were doing.
And you could see the excitement welling up on their faces
and just blurting out all kinds of obscenities about how rad it looks.
But it's because they were able to see the world they were in.
It was infectious.
And it made them go harder the next time
because they wanted to make sure that they
were getting everything lined up.
Because everything else was filling in so well.
There was a shot where they do this big dance number.
And then the queen grabs Jackson by the throat
and then lifts him up into the air.
It's meant to look like they go several 100 feet into the air,
and then the camera needs to spin around them.
The old-school way would be to put them on a wire
and actually lift them up into the air.
It means bringing in a whole stunt team.
You get into the big, bulgy harnesses.
You've got to paint everything out.
This is one of these beautiful things about virtual production.
We put them on a turntable.
We operate the camera handheld around them.
CHRISTOPHER PROBST: We had our Unreal operator.
She did some calculations and came up with a comparable rotation
of the Unreal environment in concert with the turntable
and then took the environment and slowly dropped
the floor level of that.
RICH LEE: So what you get is this perceived motion
of spinning and lift.
CHRISTOPHER PROBST: It was actually really
exciting to do that on camera.
It's all magic, as far as I'm concerned.
Ultimately, it's really satisfying to look back at what we achieved.
The editor got the footage and was just
like, where did you guys shoot this thing at?
He had no idea.
Like, what was the budget on this thing?
Your only limit is really the creativity of the filmmaker now.
You can do anything.
LOUISE BAKER LEE: You see the difference in the final product.
And if I don't ever have to work with green screen again,
I'll be a happy person.
RICH LEE: I can't stress just how awesome
it feels to know that you were able to capture something so big and so
epic.
Being able to come away from a shoot, knowing that was all in the camera,
at the end of every day, on my drive home,
the hair on the back of my neck was standing up.
I'm all in.
I'm totally an Unreal fanboy at this point.
And virtual production, I just--I can't sing its praises enough.