Shooting a feature film entirely with virtual production: the feat of 'Parenostre'

'Parenostre' premiered on April 16 carrying on its shoulders the milestone of having been the first European film shot entirely with virtual production techniques, either in immersive Simulcam environments with chroma key or with the use of LED panels. Mario Montero, director of photography, and Isaac Bergada, head of the virtual production area of Mediapro Group, address the challenges and learnings of a groundbreaking film in its visual billing and brave in its technological approaches.

Manuel Huerga, director of our father, y David Felani, executive producer of Absolute Minority, visited the sets of the film at the beginning of the film's locations. Mediapro in Barcelona. Possibly interested in the possibilities of indoor recreation, on their walk they came to a set with a screen full of LED panels. “What is this?” they asked, not knowing that in the process they would find a solution to many of the film's plot, creative and budgetary challenges.

our father It is presented as a particular biopic of the figure of Jordi Pujol father that happens, to a large extent, in his own head. Present and past intersect with scenes and times that overlap, with alternations of reality and visual representations of the ghosts that accompanied the one who was president of the Government of Catalonia from 1980 to 2003.

After receiving, as Bergada confesses, a “workshop hot”, Huerga finds in these virtual environments the tools needed to make your creative vision a reality. Felani, for his part, found an alternative to the plot demands of the work: more than 40 different scenarios and locations, which would have been a significant budgetary effort with associated travel and paperwork.

At that moment, the machinery began: Grup Mediapro was preparing to take a leap into the void (with a network, of course) to provide technological support to the first feature film shot entirely with virtual production techniques in Europe, while Huerga, accompanied by Bergada, was preparing to face a different way of working, marked by a pre-production phase that was much more demanding than usual.

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A more demanding pre-production

By opting for virtual production techniques, and leaving aside the creative opportunities that this decision may provide, everything is concentrated in a single space. Four black walls They will delimit the limits of a studio, allowing the generation of worlds and spaces inside, often malleable and customizable. However, all filming environments, as well as the particular rear projections of this modality, must be created in advance.

Isaac Bergada: "The process served to understand the dangers and benefits in each of the aspects. It was a very intense learning."

The team of our father He spent nearly two months creating all the environments that would end up giving life to the sets and locations of the feature film, always advised by Grup Mediapro so that they could be adapted to the requirements of this technology. In this way, for the conversations and car trips, the real scenarios were recorded with a rig four chamber in order to shape a 360 degree composition; On other occasions the choice was made photogrammetry, a technique consisting of taking thousands of photographs of environments and reconstructing them in a 3D environment, just as was done with the churches or with the interior of the Pujols' apartment, recreated from press photographs. This work, led by Mariona Omedes' art team, was completed with a creation of outdoor 3D environments, with recreation of traffic and crowds, like the one that accompanies the “flight” through Barcelona after the credits.

During the three weeks prior to filming, which lasted a month, Montero and Bergada made lighting tests so that the entire technical team was prepared to operate in these virtual production environments. “It was a leap into the void, because normally you are not used to such big projects, but rather you do some scene of camera car or some advertising campaign. The process served to understand the dangers and benefits in each of the aspects. It was a very intense learning experience,” highlights the head of virtual production at Grup Mediapro.

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Green or LED screens Wall

One of the key decisions that the creative and technological team of our father was to decide on one of the two modalities of virtual production according to the requirements of each scene. He 3D virtual, made in green screens, allows the creation of a completely virtual environment allowing all lighting and environmental conditions to be modified, although it required a more intense creation and production effort than that offered by the LED screens, a more direct resource, but with associated problems for the script of this feature film.

Mario Montero: "He LED It's very good, but it's more limited for certain things. For example, you don't have so much control for the light that emanates from the screen itself”.

"The LED is very good, but it is more limited for certain things. For example, you don't have as much control for the light that the screen itself emanates, nor can you design the light with as much precision," says Montero, although he considers that these supports are a "delight" for the presentation of certain landscapes or for car trips. Bergada, reflecting on both aspects, considers that, although the LED Wall It is a “window” that allows you to look into the virtual world, the chroma is “100% immersive”. For these reasons, it was decided to film the interiors of our father with the option of virtual 3D, while, for the exteriors and larger spaces, it was decided to opt for LED volumes, regardless of whether these spaces were accompanied by additional scenic elements.

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Virtual production for the director of photography

Los first two days of filming in this virtual production environment were especially complex for Montero. He surpassed all challenges with solvency and was delighted with the lighting capabilities and adaptability of these types of environments for your needs, whether adding lighting points in the 3D environments or playing with the side totems and overhead screens of the Mediapro LED environment. The problem came at the end of each recording day: "The first day of filming you see the scene without seeing anything. But, because of the system, you put your eye on the magnifying glass and you see everything decorated. I remember that, when filming was finished, I left the studio walking down the street as if floating, wondering: "Is all this real?" It's like getting on a boat during the day and getting off while maintaining that feeling on land."

Mario Montero: "I remember that, when I finished filming, I was leaving the studio, walking down the street as if floating, wondering: 'Is all this real?' It's like getting on a boat during the day, and getting off while maintaining that feeling on land."

Aside from these sensations, Montero transmits fascination for all the discovered processes during the performance of our father: “I took advantage of everything I saw and it worked.” The director of photography defines the lighting of intimate scenes, such as the room of Jordi Pujol and his wife, Marta Ferrusola, as "super easy and fast", allowing him to instantly create environments that evoke the work of Edward Hopper: "It gave me a lot of agility. Starting from a structure of a light design and architectural limits, I could continue creating on the preconceived."

Sometimes, the virtual environments They allowed the duo of Huerga and Montero redefine the plans initially proposed, which made them rethink the way they approached successive scenes of the production. This is how Bergada remembers the discovery: "You can move the camera in any direction, due to the continuity of the digital set. There were moments when we were filming the dining room where the family sits down to eat, Mario put the camera at 90º without looking and, suddenly, a shelf with some photographs was seen on the monitor. At that moment, Mario says: "What is this?" “Where is it?”, because I was not aware of everything that that virtual environment included. “He made the camera movement and Manuel bought it right away.”

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Adapting cinematographic technique to virtual environments

Initially, Montero addressed the choice of camera to shoot our father con absolute freedom. Huerga's script and approach pushed him to look for an organic camera, one that reminded him of working “with emulsion, with film.” The director of photography chose the ARRI Alexa 35, an optimal solution due to the language of the optics or the focal length in relation to the size of the sensor. Next, the Grup Mediapro team ratified its decision after verifying that the genlock, a system used to synchronize video signals between multiple devices, were perfectly adapted to the virtual environments in which they were going to operate. When it comes to optics, Montero opted for Leica Summilux, especially for the tonal gradations applied to the skins that would provide the organic tone of the feature film.

Bergada, as Grup Mediapro's virtual production coordinator, provided two production environments. On the one hand, the virtual production set ICVFX supported by solutions Unilumin; a production environment whose dimensions and capacities have improved over the months until it currently has an area of ​​18.5 x 6 meters, to which are added several mobile overhead panels and side totems. This environment is complemented by traffic tracking systems. Mon-Sys y EZtrack, although, for this production, an infrared system was chosen instead of markers to promote agility in assembly and disassembly. While for image management, Mediapro's own development called HRC, the chroma key environment, of 16 meters, was supported by the graphics engines Unreal Engine, coordinated with the same tracking systems of the LED set.

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Learning a still emerging technology

Starting from the fact that in creative processes perfection is as subjective as it is unattainable, the technical characteristics of filming our father have led to producing a imperfect tape, typical of the difficulties of a palpable and real technology, but still in its early stages of implementation. For Montero, the learning process in these environments is “infinite”, as has been his work as a director of photography for the last 30 years in a context of technological evolution.

However, the greatest lesson drawn from this process has been the choice between LED and chroma according to the needs of each scene, a task in which he has been accompanied by Xes Villa, virtual production supervisor at Grup Mediapro. As an example, a scene that has reached the final cut in which Jordi Pujol looks at the Pedraforca mountain at sunset and, having chosen the LED option instead of the chroma key, ends up resulting in a light treatment which does not quite convince the director of photography: "You have to raise your hand and say: 'This would have worked in a brutal way if it had been done with chroma key.' It would have given distance to the light outdoors. It is necessary to tell this mistake, because it also contributes to learning."

From the perspective of the service provider, Bergada considers that the advice from the first phases of the project. The head of virtual production at Mediapro considers this “mutual trust” essential, as well as having set “very strict” limits on production, which later became blurred as they extracted the maximum possible from a technology whose full potential is still unexplored.

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Postproduction with virtual production

When facing the editing, VFX and color grading of the film, the team our father has only been found with ease, to the point that Absolute Minority has certified a significant improvement in post-production times. Beyond the assembly, carried out daily by Manuel Huerga with the support of Gus Alcocer, the visual effects could be applied very fast thanks to the flow of synchronous work for Grup Mediapro's chroma key environments: "We save all the layers separately, including matte or camera movement, which gives the creators the freedom to make infinite modifications, let's talk about the decoration of the dining room or the size of a window frame. If you had shot with a traditional chroma key, you would have had to multiply the entire post-production process by more than two."

Isaac Bergada: “With this technique, the creators come, shoot their film and they have to forget that they are shooting in LED or chroma. You only have to worry that the camera SUBMIT what they want.”

The parts shot with LED environments did undergo a process of more traditional post-production, but no more complicated than a traditional shoot. As Montero explains: "It felt very organic to me. I didn't feel any limit and, in terms of temperature, I felt like a normal film. (...) I worked with Pepín (Ndr: José Pedraza), who is a genius and with whom I have already made other films. The color came in like a silk."

Bergada and the Grup Mediapro team consider it necessary to evangelize and debunk myths about this type of production. The company's goal is to eliminatethe technological layer" to the artist or creator, so that they don't worry about technological concepts and can deploy their creativity. "With this technique, creators come, shoot their film and have to forget that they are shooting in LED or chroma key. They only have to worry about the camera transmitting what they want.”

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Can boundaries be broken down?

Shooting a feature film entirely with virtual production techniques is closer to becoming a alternative for production teams that seek to reduce costs when carrying out large locations and movements throughout the world, or to promote the comfort of production equipment centralizing most efforts in a single location. It must be taken into account, however, that the industry is faced with a technology that, even with great examples of its application, such as the series The Mandalorian or various movie scenes like Poor Things, has important limitations inherent to its nature or the technological evolution of the technical components that surround it.

Mario Montero: “We live in a world in which the viewer He is very visually trained. My daughter does crazy things with cell phones. But the important thing is that what comes out from within us has a real narrative sense; that you can explain it narratively and with transparency”.

“You have to know how to adapt the limitations for your creativity and your manipulation,” considers Montero, pointing out that, while chroma key environments do offer all the creative possibilities you can imagine, LED screens could continue to advance in the exact reproduction of color temperatures, with their respective consequences on processes such as lighting. For his part, Bergada considers natural these restrictions and relates them to the nature of technological progress: “Since we shot the film, we have expanded our tracking; we have improved our facilities and we have more than 200 square meters of LED; Technicians have also evolved and have acquired and trained new skills. Our task is to try to ensure that the team is always prepared for when people like Mario come and put challenges in front of us.”

"We live in a world in which the viewer is very visually trained. My daughter does amazing things with cell phones. But the important thing is that what comes out of us has a real narrative meaning; that you can explain it narratively and with transparency. That is a more mature way of working," says Montero, trusting that the progress of film techniques virtual production can continue to accompany you in all your creative processes.

A report by Sergio Julián Gómez