We visited the Italian super technological film study that creates wallpapers for series and cinema.
I walk on the snow in front of a hut and splendid whitewashed fir trees, in a perfect Christmas atmosphere. Or at least this is the impression that those who are looking at the resumption of this scene performed with a digital camera. In reality, the candid landscape, the wooden house and every single snowflake, emerge in all their incredible authenticity from a bright wall that surrounds me: a gigantic display, made with a series of LED technology modules, similar to the one used in the municipalities.
Goodbye to the green screen. The magic, called Virtual Productionwhich allows you to change the scenario with a quick click, passing shortly from an urban landscape to the desert, from a real place to a fantasy, it is carried out in the CR49 studio of Sts Communication, a Bresso company (Milan) that uses this solution to shoot films, commercials, musical video clips and much more. «The study was born in 2020 to replace what was the technique of Green Screena green background usually used in films or in other productions “, explains Alberto Azzola, general manager of STS,” to insert the actors in a scenario, real or fantastic, which first was added to the computer only after filming (with a series of complications for the technicians of the visual effects, including the removal of the reflections of green light on the faces of the actors, editor’s note) » “The advantage of this technology is that the Green Screen is replaced by a huge display in which you can not only make any image appear”, adds Pasquale Croce, virtual production supervisor, “but above all it is possible to make it move in perfect harmony with the movement of the camera, so that the scenario behind the subject moves, making the same effect of parallax with respect to the camera that is created in reality, The objects before our eyes move differently: more those close to us and imperceptibly or not at all the distant or on the horizon ».
Wallpapers in real time. Such a study can cost up to 5 million euros of equipment only: first of all the 24 -meter videowall in width and 6 in height, created with 50 centimeters modules and a resolution of 2,400×9,600 pixels each, “which however can be mounted with each other without any limit of size”, as specific cross, “so much so that we have made a 90×5 meters for the series for the series Unwanted».
Then there are the digital camera, the sensors and the software that allow you to recreate the background in real time according to the position in the space from which the shot is performed: «A sensor on the camera and some capable of determining the focus parameters, zoom and so on, allow you to create in real time, frame for a frame, the background. This is possible thanks to the use of the same software used to create the 3D video game worlds of video games, which previously had a cartoon style but today they are photorealistic ».
In doing so, you can use the megadysplay LED not only to insert people in fantastic scenarios, but for example to create credible backgrounds that appear behind sets built in the study itself (or by bringing the videowall outdoors): so you can build the office of a bank for a spot, positioning behind the windows the panorama of a city, or create the set of a railway carriage, using the screen to show the illusion that give the move that is traveling through various landscapes.
Less carbon dioxide. “The advantages for those who produce are many,” says Azzola. «You can save up to 50 percent in logistical costs, because often there is no need to move the crew and equipment in a place that can be recreated in the studio, as done for example by the TV series Mandalorianin which the science fiction backgrounds of Star Wars they were similarly made. This of course also involves a reduction of CO2 caused precisely by movement ».
“Then there is a huge advantage from the production point of view,” explains Croce, “because with the green screen technique who read on the set had the slightest idea of what would surround it and that would have been added to the computer only to finished shooting, while with virtual production it can see the environment in which every scene takes place. Furthermore, given that LEDs are a light source that illuminates the subjects taken with the same colors that there would be in reality, all the reflections on the people or objects taken from the truth are credible and require less interventions to the color correction of the color to be carried out in postproduction. Not to mention that a series of somewhat vintage lenses can also be used for filming whose effects on the image are perfectly simulated also in the background ».
By creating the illusion that the actor taken up in front of the Great Chinese wall or in the Sahara desert, while in reality he is in the province of Milan.
