Virtual Production

Perform in front of a green screen; add the landscape afterwards. For a long time that was simply how it was done. The Mandalorian, in 2019, stopped doing it. A semicircle of LED walls and ceiling twenty feet high and 270 degrees around, enclosing a stage seventy-five feet across. The walls carry the landscape in real time, and when the camera moves, the viewpoint inside the wall moves with it — far things shift slowly, near things quickly, correctly out of step. The actors are genuinely looking at the place, and the light of it lands on their skin where they stand. More than half of season one was shot inside it. ILM calls the system StageCraft; on set it is simply "the Volume".\n\nBy this map's own rule, this is not the first either. ILM itself says it stands on more than a decade of accumulated work. The director, Jon Favreau, had already worked VR equipment hard on The Lion King. And long before that, projecting a background onto a screen behind the actors was standard practice back in the studio-system era — the landscape rushing past a car window was usually a cloth behind it. What is different is that the cloth now moves. It knows where the camera is, and the world shifts to match. A hundred years of technique changed at exactly that one point.\n\nThis map divides in two at the very top: the record and the magic. Virtual production is unmistakably a child of the magic. The painted flats Méliès set up in his glass-roofed studio now move on their own.