Virtual production is utilized to offer vibrant and realistic surroundings in current film content, such as television series like The Mandalorian. According to van Wingerden (2021), The Mandalorian is a famous science-fiction show set in the Star Wars universe, which includes two seasons from 2019 to 2020. Disney’s The Mandalorian is frequently mentioned as a brilliant example of virtual production in use today (Kunkel & Griffis, 2021). Fang et al. (2020) state that The Mandalorian is a technological breakthrough in the field of machinima, also known as machine film, game engine film, or engine animation. Engine movies are “the heart of movies,” and video works are created by combining gaming engines’ real-time graphics production capacity and the movies’ aesthetic language (Fang et al., 2020, p. 1030). Thus, the technologies used in the Mandalorian had a revolutionary impact on the film industry.
Essentially, technological progress accelerated the replacement of green screens with LED walls. Nevill (2021a) suggests that The Mandalorian was among the first to utilize real-time visuals and LED walls entirely. Balogh et al. (2021) inform that LED screens are predicted to dominate future displays. The virtual set is a cubic virtual environment surrounded by four LED walls powered by the Unreal Engine (Fang et al., 2020). The content displayed by LED can be altered and updated in real time based on the virtual camera’s position (Seymour, 2020; Raursø et al., 2021). Tools like Stage Manager are not necessary to manage an LED Stage; nevertheless, nDisplay and Multi-user are required for the deployment of an LED staging to support this next-generation in-camera VFX (James et al., 2021; Seymour, 2020; Zell, 2020).
Important to add that the Unreal Engine enhances production dramatically. Significantly, most of the technologies used in The Mandalorian are in Unreal Engine 4.24 and 4.25, which allows using two cameras simultaneously (Seymour, 2020). The launch of Unreal Engine delivers interactive movies with more pleasant storyline guarantees and continues to bridge the technological gap between games and films (Nevill, 2021b; Nop et al., 2019). To conclude, the cinematographic industry continues to evolve by utilizing the latest technologies such as LED walls and Unreal Engine.
Reference List
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Fang, Z., Cai, L., Juan, G., & Wang, G. (2020). ‘Interactive movie design based on the game engine technology’. Proceedings of the 2020 4th International Conference on Electronic Information Technology and Computer Engineering.
James, O., Achard, R., Bird, J., & Cooper, S. (2021). ‘Colour-managed LED walls for virtual production’. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2021 Talks, pp. 1-2. Web.
Kunkel, T., & Griffis, P. (2021). ‘2021 High-dynamic range (HDR) progress report’. SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal, 130(8), 101-107.
Nevill, A. (2021a). Towards a Philosophy of Cinematography. Palgrave Macmillan.
Nevill, A. (2021b). ‘Exploring exposure processes’. In Towards a Philosophy of Cinematography (pp. 57-86). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
Nop, K., Manissaward, J., & Oattarapon, T. (2019). ‘Development of character design frameworks using game engine: Unreal Engine’. In 2019 Joint International Conference on Digital Arts, Media and Technology with ECTI Northern Section Conference on Electrical, Electronics, Computer and Telecommunications Engineering (ECTI DAMT-NCON) (pp. 54-59). IEEE.
Raursø, N.E., Rasmussen, M.E., Persson, M.K., Petersen, T.A., Garðarsson, K.B. and Schoenau-Fog, H. (2021). ‘Lean-back machina: Attention-based skippable segments in interactive cinema. In International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (pp. 128-141). Springer, Cham.
Seymour, M. (2020). Art of (LED wall) virtual production sets. Part two: ‘How you make one. Web.
van Wingerden R. (2021). ‘The Gospel According to Disney+’s “The Mandalorian”’. Religions, 12(5), p. 350. Web.
Zell, J. (2020). ‘HPA “Lost Lederhosen” short movie: From camera to cloud—from production through post-production and finishing in 1 day. SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal, 129(8), 138-142.