Hi, I'm Max Rocchetti, and I'm the Chief Creative Officer
of Luno Studios.
I want to thank everybody at Epic games
for having us on this panel.
We feel very humbled and honored to be
in the company of such superstars
of the movie making business.
Thank you.
Just to give you a little backstory on how we got here
two years ago, we started developing our own tools
for virtual production, and I got invited
to the first virtual production summit
in Los Angeles, where I was able to reconnect
with a lot of colleagues and friends
that I hadn't seen a long time.
And most importantly, we were shown this demo that now I
think is world famous.
The famous bike demo.
When we came back to Italy, I was completely
focused on how do we get the smart stage
initiative off the ground.
And my road map looked like this.
In our rounds of meetings, we met with a lot of people.
And one day, we got approached by my friend and producer
at Indiana Productions, Alessandro Mascheroni,
and he asked me, OK, if we had the show,
how fast can you get a smart stage ready?
You need to do it in like, one month.
We had a really tough challenge ahead of us.
And but I also knew we couldn't have had a better chance,
and we wouldn't have had another chance.
So we just had to bite the bullet and do it.
We actually decided to organize a couple of tests
because we needed to pick our weapons of choice.
So choose the best combination of LED panel versus camera
lens package versus filters.
When we brought back the footage from the lab,
we realized that we had a show.
That convinced everybody to green-light the show
and start pre-production.
So after coming back from the test,
we scouted the soundstage that was available to us.
And we quickly realized that our first design wouldn't work.
We could actually hang the LED roof
from the natural attach points.
So the first piece of advice I can give to you
is make sure you scout the stage, you're
scouting with the person that knows that stage inside and out
and knows exactly how much weight the structural point
where are you going to attach yourself
can carry in terms of weight.
So we had to go back to the drawing board,
and our new design looked something
that came straight out of Megadeth concert.
One thing is bringing a film into a virtual production
permanent stage where you're working
in a controlled environment where all the factors
and variables are being already ironed out.
But when you actually are bringing the virtual production
on set that's not being designed from there,
that's a whole different ballgame.
So you need to account for a lot of things.
We had mostly like three sequences,
and their main sequence will take place
on the Martian landscape.
So we concentrated our efforts in creating the Martian
environments.
We built out 64 square kilometers
of Martian landscape and then model
and generated a savory hero asset
that we would use like such a [INAUDIBLE]
and everything and hills.
And once these libraries of rocks and assets was done,
we shared with the art department
to make sure that whatever set build they would
work on, it would actually match our color palette
and our shapes.
So that the virtual environment and the physical set
would actually blend seamlessly.
So while content production was moving forward in Milan,
it was time to go down Rome and start building the LED wall.
And so many factors come in when,
again, when you're building this thing,
and there are all of these components that
need to talk to each other.
Need to accept each other's signal and make sure
they play well.
There is no lag, lots of sleepless nights
for us to get this conundrum to work.
We are a week away from shoot, LED the wall is up and running,
there's just one tiny problem.
I had no storyboards.
I would know what we're going to shoot on the day,
and I asked myself, OK, how will I shoot this in order
to have enough coverage to actually edit the scene?
We basically created and dressed six locations.
And each one of these locations and a master shot
and a reverse angle.
That meant having 12 different lighting setups.
So we needed a system that will
allow us to switch locations, cameras,
and lighting setups and do it with the flick of a button.
That required quite a bit of work
from the guys and Excel Alarms
that have been amazing in creating a custom toolset
that really saved the day.
So it was highly stressful but also
very rewarding to do magic.
We could like jump from A cam, B cam to reverse angle of A cam.
People that were behind the screen, filmmakers,
and producers alike could not believe their eyes
what we were able to do in real-time as the shoot was
actually happening.
So you're probably wondering what the end result was.
And I will show you like a couple shots of the show.
The show is a comedy.
So don't think the visuals too seriously.
And this one here, we see a main character standing
outside on the Martian landscape.
This one was particularly tricky because, in the background,
we didn't have the usual Martian landscape,
and the camera move also pretty wide.
That's a combination of tracking and panning.
The next shot is the reverse angle of the previous shot.
It's a pretty nice shot.
And I think the connection between the LED
wall and the physical set, it's pretty good.
And this one shot, it might seems
easier because there's no connection between the end
of the wall and the physical set,
but instead, we ended up [INAUDIBLE] some reflections
on to make sure you had the feeling that there's
essentially a glass between the interior of the airport
and the exterior of the airport.
At the end of the day, we got all our shots.
And we did it without a single hour of overtime.
Considering that this sequence was scheduled
to be shot just like a traditional shoot,
it was a very tight schedule.
Where, in fact, we were in uncharted territory.
So that's a small feat in itself.
And the only way I was able to do it
because I had a crew members that were trained.
Knew what the dynamics on set were,
knew what the chain of command was and reacted accordingly.
I hope this presentation was somewhat
helpful to you and for all of you guys that are out there.
You know, it just goes to show that if you want
your mind to it, it's possible.
Ciao, from Max at Luno Studios, take care.
Thank you to Warner Brothers and Indiana Productions
for supporting us, for believing
that we can pull this off.
And thank you so much to Epic Games
for supporting us from day one and inviting us to this panel.