How Virtual Production Encourages Crucial Workflow Changes (And Not Just The Obvious Ones)

Episode 8 of The Making of Resignation: Now What?

If you’ve been following our series about The Making of Resignation, you read our screed about the Waterfall Process in film—aka the “everyone waits for their turn to do the work” workflow—and how virtual production allows us to parallelize tasks and get more done in a normal workday.

Well, even with that, at a macro level filmmaking is still a Waterfall Process. You can’t alter the order of the big steps:

1. Pre-Production, which has to happen before:

2. Production, which has to wrap up before:

3. Post-Production.

Or… can you?

For the Resignation pilot, our post-production partners at Prysm Chicago volunteered to do something unique. We had a couple of their VFX artists actually create some of the virtual environments for the pilot’s 22 virtual locations.

That meant that the post-production team had an excuse to join in our pre-production planning meetings, production design meetings, and shoot days themselves. And that turned out to be game changing. We iterated effectively on art in a way that got us a higher quality outcome, and we wasted no time in the communication or handoff for what needed to be fixed in post. Post was there for it all.

We don’t think this is a one-off type of situation. If your post-production house has good visual effects chops, we’d dare say you SHOULD get them involved in creating your virtual environments. Or at least get them in the room where Virtual Art design decisions are made.

Engaging your Post team earlier can have positive second-order effects for the whole production. For us, it paid off in the form of a more agile feedback loop in pre-production, and a more efficient post-production timeline.

Watch Prysm Studios talk about their experience on Resignation in our final episode below. (And by the way, if you’re looking for great VAD and post services in Chicago, you should hire them.)

Thanks for joining us as we shared the lessons from this journey. If any of this resonates with you—or if you have any strong counterarguments from your own virtual production experience, we’d love to hear your perspectives.

We’ll share occasional updates on Resignation as it makes its way to screens, but from here on this Substack will go back to our usual One Post Every Week Or So schedule.

Stay tuned for our upcoming State of the Soundstage Report and some chewy content on virtual production cost comparisons.

Til then, we hope The Making of Resignation inspires you to change the way you work. We know we’re never going back to the way we used to do film, that’s for sure!

—Team SHOWRUNNER