How To Shoot Twice As Efficiently Using Virtual Production

Episode 7 of The Making of Resignation: The Do-Si-Do

A typical film production uses what’s called a Waterfall Methodology. On a shoot day, this is roughly what happens:

1. Locations team preps the shooting location

2. Everyone else waits

3. Art department decorates the set

4. Everyone else waits

5. Grip & Electric department lights the scene

6. Everyone else waits

7. Camera team sets up the upcoming shot(s)

8. Everyone else waits

9. Actors get called to set, and Director and Camera team shoot the scene

10. Everyone else watches

This process is not arduous on purpose. G&E literally can’t get a set lit if it’s not decorated yet. Camera can’t really dial in a shot if the set isn’t lit yet. And all these people can’t fit in the same space all at the same time.

Virtual production, however, gives us a chance to hack the filmmaking waterfall.

When we planned out the pilot shoot for Resignation, scheduling constraints dictated that we had to squeeze a star actor's scenes all into two shoot days. Normally in this situation, you’d rewrite the script, or go drum up more money from your financiers to add extra shoot days, or find something to compromise.

In our case, we purposely took on the challenge of shooting everything with our star in two shoot days. And that meant a day with 8 locations.

But you can’t do 8 locations using the above work-and-wait-and-work-and-wait waterfall process.

We literally had no way to accomplish this without rethinking the way things are done.

Luckily, we were shooting in virtual production—which meant locations could be transported to us in the click of a button. And using our SHOWRUNNER technology, we could save lighting and virtual location settings ahead of time and instantly load them up.

Perhaps most importantly for this challenge, on these days we were shooting at Resolution Studios in Chicago, where we could configure two LED walls inside the main soundstage.

So we designed a process where the crew could bounce back and forth between the two walls in what you might call a Double Waterfall methodology:

1. World operator brings up Location A on LED wall A, and Location B on LED wall B

2. Art department decorates Set A

3. This first set is the only time everyone else waits

4. G&E quickly lights Set A, (Gaffer loads up pre-light settings from the day before using SHOWRUNNER), while Art department decorates Set B.

5. Camera team sets up the shots on Set A, while G&E lights Set B.

6. Actors get called to set, and Director and Camera team shoot Set A.

7. Actors, Director, and Camera pop over to shoot on Set B, while Art and G&E turn Set A into a new location.

8. Actors, Director, and Camera pop over to shoot at the new Set A, while Art and G&E turn Set B into a new location.

9. Repeat the process, bouncing between the two sets.

This might sound exhausting for the crew (especially Art), and it was. But we wrapped early on our 8-location Do-Si-Do day.

This day took careful planning—and truly played out like a giant choreographed dance.

And afterwards, we decided we’ll do as many Do-Si-Do days as we can in our future productions. It was exhilarating and productive and collaborative—and our crew got home in time for dinner.

The moral we learned from this story is this:

Virtual production can allow a few people do more planning up front, so more people can waste less time later.

Enjoy Episode 7 of The Making of Resignation:

See you next week with our final episode in this series.

—Team SHOWRUNNER

P.S. Big shout-outs to Big Works (our intrepid Art department), 2nd Decade Productions (our Camera team) and Miller Creative (our VAD and World Operator team for the Do-Si-Do). If you’re ever shooting VP in Chicago, you should hire them.