Episode Notes
In this new episode we’re delving into the captivating world of virtual production with none other than Emmy and Addy Award-winning filmmaker and director, Scott Rice.
Here’s what you can expect:
- The Power of Virtual Production: Join us as Scott Rice unravels the magic behind virtual production, showcasing its ability to seamlessly transport us to diverse and immersive environments, all within the confines of a studio.
- Expanding Horizons: Discover how Scott’s Script to Screen class has evolved to encompass commercial projects, offering students a unique opportunity to bridge the worlds of advertising and filmmaking while gaining hands-on experience.
- Inside the Virtual Studio: Get an exclusive peek behind the scenes as Scott walks us through the virtual production process, from LED walls to real-time rendering, and learn how this cutting-edge technology is reshaping the landscape of filmmaking.
- Advantages and Accessibility: Explore the accessibility of virtual production technology and its potential to revolutionize filmmaking for creators of all levels, offering both time and cost efficiencies without compromising on quality.
So, if you’re ready to embark on a journey into the future of filmmaking, then hit play now and join us on La Pizarra!
Don’t forget to subscribe to stay updated on future episodes and share this insightful conversation with your friends on social media.
Tag us @nickymondellini I’d love to hear your thoughts!
You can contact Scott in social media at @scottricedirector
Check out Scott’s virtual production video here:
Inside Stray Vista Studios’ VIP Virtual Production Workshop
Transcript
Scott Rice: That’s really the power of virtual production, that you can just shoot all these different environments just back-to-back. You just throw it up on the LED wall, bring in some different art department stuff for the foreground, and go. Put in some atmosphere, some haze, and it’s like magic, so I just love it.
Automated Voice: La Pizzara, this late. Exploring creative minds in the entertainment industry. Here’s your host, Nikki Mondolini.
Nikki Mondolini: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of La Pizarra. My name is Nikki Mondolini, and I’m very happy that you’re joining us today. We’re still in the middle of Season 9, and my guest today is someone who you heard before on Season 5 of this podcast, and I’m going to link to that episode in the show notes. His name is Scott Rice. He’s an Emmy and Addy Award-winning filmmaker and director. You can find him on Instagram as @scottricedirector. Scott has worked with talent like Glenn Close, Brett Faber, and Matthew McConaughey. He is the owner and executive producer of Two Shot West, a production company in Austin, Texas.
Like I said before, I’m going to link to the previous episode in the show notes. I encourage you to listen to it to find out more about Scott’s career, as well as how the class that he teaches at UT with Matthew McConaughey called Script to Screen got started. Today we’re going to learn about virtual production, and Scott will share with us a workshop in which he directed Share Your Imagination, which is a film that he directed and wrote. This was done at Stray Vista Studios, and together with Narwhal Studios, they opened up the doors and allowed filmmakers, both in person and virtually, to experience a virtual production set.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I really can’t wait to hear all about this amazing experience. Just to let you know a little bit more about Scott, his work includes a staggering film festival record of 300 official selections and 85 awards. His films have been distributed on Comedy Central, Showtime, Hulu, Blockbuster, and PBS. He has also directed projects for A&E, The Mental Health Channel, MTV Networks, and Sony Pictures. Now, let’s explore the creative mind of Scott Rice. Oh my gosh, welcome to another episode here with us in La Pizarra. It’s wonderful to have you back because there’s so many wonderful updates in your life that I’m dying to ask you about.
Scott: Yes, no, I can’t wait to talk to you. I had so much fun last time. It was a real pleasure, and thanks for having me back.
Nikki: It was great. Like I said in the intro, I’m going to link to that previous episode in the show notes because if people want to know a little bit more about how you got started, about the Script to Screen class, because you went into detail about how it all started. They should definitely listen to that episode. For right now, I’m so happy that you don’t have a black eye anymore, but tell me all about that.
Scott: Yes, so I can’t remember how much I talked about last time, but I basically tripped on a cat, a shop cat in a gift store, and yes, I didn’t see it. I went face first into a table, the corner of a table, my full weight into my eye. I thought I was instantly blinded. That was two years ago. Then I had a couple of surgeries to fix it because it broke my eye socket.
Nikki: Really?
Scott: Yes. Then my eye didn’t point the right direction. Imagine being a filmmaker where your whole life depends on being able to see-
Nikki: On you sight.
Scott: -and then you can’t see. I’m wearing, like I was wearing an eye patch for a long time and I saw double, the whole world.
Nikki: Oh my God.
Scott: Imagine how dizzying it would be. That’s been my last two years and I just had another surgery to correct it a little better. It’s gotten a little better. I just had a surgery about four weeks ago, and I’m just enough with eye surgeries. I tell you, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and the lesson, a couple lessons I’ve gotten from this, well, the big one is just gratitude. Right after I got hurt, I just prayed. I’m like, just please let me keep my vision as long as I can see, I can deal with the rest. The eye, I thought the eyeball exploded, but it didn’t. The eye is fine. It’s just around the eye that’s broken.
I’m just very grateful that I can see. I see double. When I look up, I see double and stuff, but if I hold my head right, I see fine. I’m very grateful. It makes you appreciate your vision more. As a filmmaker, I just don’t take it for granted anymore. Every time I look at a sunset, I get chills thinking about it. I’m like, how beautiful. Just being able to see something beautiful now takes my breath away a little bit more than it did before. I’m grateful for the, as difficult as it’s been, I think the net positive has been really great all things considered.
Nikki: That must have happened after our interview, because you definitely didn’t have a black eye last time we spoke. Oh my goodness. That really must have been terrifying for you. I can definitely, just to think about being in your shoes in that moment.
Scott: There’s so many people I know in the business who, there’s so many of us who just struggle with a secret issue, like a physical issue. I know a DP who has to have constant surgeries on his hand because he has hand muscles issues. Yes, he’s always holding a camera and he never complains about it. My aunt is legally blind, but she’s a photographer and she’s constantly taking photos. It gave me an appreciation for people who do suffer, who do struggle physically, and then mentally too. We all have mental health stuff that we struggle with. It just makes you stronger to just have to work a little bit harder to make your dream a reality. I can appreciate that.
Nikki: Yes. On the other side of that is knowing how you can persevere even through those obstacles-
Scott: Yes.
Nikki: -because, oh my gosh, if you can, like you said, it just makes you appreciate what you have a whole lot more and then you excel at it because you’re trying so much more. I’ve done shows. I don’t know how I was able to give a performance in the middle of postpartum depression.
Scott: There you go.
Nikki: I went ahead and did it. If you ask me to remember exactly how the performance went, I can’t tell you. I really can’t. The director came to me and he said, “This is one of your best performances.” I’m like, “Really?” There you go.
Scott: There you go.
Nikki: You just never know. It’s just you compensate like you’re there. Your creative instinct kicks in and, sorry, and you just, you make it work.
Scott: I like that idea of instinct, too. You just have to act on instinct because you’re so spent. You don’t have your conscious mind left. You’re so spent and you’re suffering. You just act on heart and instinct and you get through. That’s a great example of just the strength of the human spirit, that it’s not really about our intellect in the end as artists. It’s really about our gut instincts and how much we want it and how much we really love what we do despite, any obstacles that there might be, either internally or externally. That’s so interesting. I’m glad you shared that.
Nikki: Yes, exactly. Yes. It’s one of those things, that you don’t know, but definitely it’s great to hear about all of these things because people don’t know. They see the finished product. The product, the film or the commercial or whatever. Gosh, we’re all human. We all go through everything that everybody else goes through and we just keep pushing, so that’s wonderful. I wanted to ask you, definitely we’re going to get into virtual production, but we spoke a little bit about the Scripted Screen class, which is mainly for film. Now you said that the new thing is going to be done also for commercials. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Scott: Yes. About a year and a half ago, Matthew McConaughey decided, hey, let’s do a commercials class because Matthew actually loves advertising, loves marketing, and that’s a big passion of his. Sometimes we look at film people and we think, oh, they must look down on commercials and stuff like that. A lot of times they don’t. Aa lot of filmmakers, a lot of actors, a lot of their main income is from commercials and that’s what allows them to go do the passion projects that don’t really pay or pay as much, for example. The same thing applies to Matthew McConaughey.
He can pick any movie he wants, no matter the budget, even smaller things, because he does all this commercial work. He actually really loves commercials. We decided to put together a commercials class that we also co-teach and we brought in a professor from the advertising department, Dr. Laura Bright. This is our second semester we’ve been doing it. In fact, I just had my first day of class yesterday. Awesome, we have 40 students, half of them are from advertising and half of them are from RTF, which is radio, TV, film, the film program.
Then we all worked together
to put the agency side, the creating the ad campaign and doing all the metrics and stuff together with the production and pulling off the vision physically on set. It’s really been a joy to do and I’m glad we’re doing it for another semester now.
Nikki: Is it like the same experience that you take the students on set and then they get to see everything that goes on from the ground up, the set or scouting the locations and getting everything together, the costumes and makeup and casting wise. They get to see all of that as well, they get to see how actors are cast and how everything goes on.
Scott: Yes. We have one component which is in the classroom where we show them how production companies bid on commercial work, put together a budget, the director puts together a treatment and usually three production companies/directors are competing for the same job. We teach how that’s done. Then we show how those meetings go and then once you get the job we show the pre-production process and the production process. Last May, in fact, I directed a public service announcement for Matthew McConaughey himself. He was doing the Green Lights Grant Initiative which basically is helping schools in the US get federal dollars to make their schools safer.
We did this PSA, we did a 60 second spot where Matthew’s talking to camera and walking through a school and it was really cool. I got a DP friend of mine to come out from LA to shoot it, and I had just students on set from the class. They get to work with Matthew who’s their professor but then also the on camera talent, and also he’s the creative director for the campaign as well. He’s not just the talent, he’s also the guy who came up with the idea. He did a similar thing on some of his salesforce campaigns which are really huge and play on national television and during the Super Bowl and stuff like that.
It’s really cool and like this semester, I know we’ll talk about virtual production in a minute but I’m shooting a commercial campaign that’s also playing during the Super Bowl regionally in five states. We’re doing a virtual production shoot and the students from my class are really excited to be on set. I got a lot of volunteers because virtual production, it’s just cool. It’s like that’s how they make shows like The Mandalorian so everyone wants to see how it’s done.
Nikki: Of course.
Scott: Sure enough it’s just a remarkable technology. We’ll be on set in about a week with students shooting virtual production.
Nikki: Can you share a little bit about what the storyline is for that or is it like top secret for now?
Scott: Yes, it’s for a bank and it has a CG character and it’s comedic and we’re in a bunch of different environments. It really helps us to do it virtual production because that allows us to be in a bedroom, then in a man cave basement, and then in a campsite in a desert, and then on a rural road with a moving vehicle. It’s just like you can’t get to all these locations, you can’t shoot six different environments in two days.
Nikki: Can you imagine the budget for that?
Scott: Oh yes.
Nikki: The manpower and just the, yes, it just takes too much.
Scott: The time it takes to travel and then that adds to all the days you have to shoot. That’s really the power of virtual production that you can just shoot all these different environments just back to back. You just throw it up on the LED wall, bring in some different art department stuff for the foreground and go, put in some atmosphere, some haze and it’s like magic. I just love it.
Nikki: Now that you’re talking into, let’s get a little bit more into that because my question is whether– so you have a set and it has to be really big. Do you build everything that you mentioned? There’s the road and then maybe it’s, I don’t know, an interior set, it’s a living room or a house. You have all those different sets like you would shoot, I don’t know, when I used to do soap operas, we had the set of the living room and then the house and then the school and it was all different, like smaller sets but in a big studio, and of course, the cameras would just move from one place to the other. Is it similar?
Scott: It’s different in that the camera doesn’t have to move. You’re on this thing called a volume where you have one stage where you can have all your action happen. I shot virtual production for the first time, I think in November and we shot a short film that was like an Indiana Jones adventure story. It took place, it stars this kid who has this flight of fantasy about him being an Indiana Jones like hero. It takes place on a city street, it takes place in an Indiana Jones like cave, and then it takes place in a jungle, and we shot it in two days. What we did is it has all these action scenes and running and all this stuff but we really shot it in this 20 by 20 square foot space and you would never know.
How it works is what goes up on the LED wall, this huge wall, it’s 20 feet tall, is a 3D virtual environment that’s done with a game engine called the Unreal Engine and it’s all 3D and you put it up on the wall and then you point the camera and you might have a person in front of the camera. Then when you move the camera like this the background moves too. All the parallax happens in 3D space, in that virtual 3D space and that’s what tricks the eye into thinking, oh we must be, that person must be in this real environment because I see him in a jungle and when the camera moves this way the parallax of all the trees and stuff moves behind that person.
It’s a virtual set but however it’s not really super realistic unless like you said you bring in real objects. Art department really brings in physical stuff so in the case of a jungle you bring in all these plants. In the case of a cave you have all these rocks and they’re in the foreground, and then the mid ground and then the background behind the character and then you have the wall. See what I’m saying? All this stuff works together so that when the camera moves you have the parallax of the rocks in the foreground, and then the mid ground and of the character.
Then you have all the digital rocks and the cave behind moving in a similar way, and the background knows the camera lens so it adjusts the focus based on what your focal length is and everything. It’s just like, it’s really cool and then if you show the floor you have to bring in a floor to the set. In the case of a cave we brought in these flats that look like dirt and then we put fake rocks on top of them, and then you have the real dirt and then you have this LED wall, and on the LED wall is the digital dirt ground. You have to match the color of the two and you put some rocks around the scene, and it just looks like the background just goes into infinity, goes into this virtual world.
I found myself saying things like, the art director I’d say, “Hey, I think we need to move that plant. Can you move that plant, oh wait a minute, that’s on the wall, that’s one of the virtual plants.: I can’t even tell, I can’t tell where the real world ends and the virtual world begins. It’s just like, I’m just like a kid in a candy store playing with the stuff because I used to work in games and I understand video game engines. I’ve done a lot of visual effects but it’s really cool to do this technology because you don’t have to shoot on green screen and then replace the background later.
It’s all in real time, you capture it, you’re rolling the camera and it’s there like that is a real background environment. It’s like having a huge jungle set that looks like it goes off to the horizon and looked totally real.
Nikki: I’m glad you mentioned green screen because I was going to tell you or ask you how is it different from having a green screen but it’s a totally different thing, so it’s not even the same a camera that you can use with a green screen.
Scott: The camera can be the same actually but the technology that understands what the camera is seeing is different. You basically have a computer that’s hooked up to the virtual environment that’s tracking what the camera is doing, and making the virtual environment behave in a way as if it were a real environment responding to the camera panning or tracking or whatever. One of the other amazing advantages is the light that’s hitting your character. If you’re on a green screen, you have some green spill, some green light is bouncing off the wall and that’s bad.
You have to like the person based on how you think the background is going to look but what’s really cool in virtual production, you have all the light and the colors that are coming let’s say from the desert sunset that’s happening behind me. It’s all bouncing around the studio and hitting me. It’s very immersive, it feels like not only can the actor, does the actor feel like they’re in a real environment opposed to being in this green space that they have to imagine that they’re in the desert.
You can see it and the light, the quality of the light that’s bouncing around is actually coming off the LED wall.
Then one step further, if you have any like, glass or reflective material, the reflections show. Famously on the show The Mandalorian, the main character, the Mandalorian, he’s got this Beskar metal suit, and it’s very reflective. If you’re shooting on green screen, it would just reflect all the green and be a nightmare. That’s why you couldn’t use reflections on green screen. Because you’re shooting virtual production and that background is really there, it’s reflecting off the suit. When someone’s watching that image, their brain just goes, well, they must be in the desert because I’m seeing the desert reflected in the suit. It has to be real.
Likewise, cars, if you do a driving scene, it’s so amazing, like the windshield, the reflection of, let’s say you have the environment going by you as if you’re driving in a car, you can see all the trees going by in the reflections. Then your brain goes, well, they must be, I see all these reflections. They must be really moving. I see the environment in the background moving. I see reflections on the windshield. It has to be real. There’s a lot of advantages to shooting virtual production opposed to green screen.
Nikki: Oh, for sure. Definitely. Do you use different lighting than you would use for a regular shoot?
Scott: We use similar lighting. the last shoot I did with Jimmy Lindsay, who’s a great DP, he just worked on Ghostbusters, the new Ghostbusters movie. He’s shot on Picard, the Star Trek show. He just put all the lighting up in the grid. It was very fast. We didn’t really have to move lights around very much. It was like being on a stage with all the lights set up in the grid, like a TV show, like you were mentioning. You can just adjust the lights really quick on the light board. It was a lot less, didn’t take as much time to light because, when you’re in a real environment, you got to move the lights and you got to put them on stands and you got to go out the window and put up flags and then you got to move to a new room and all that. All the lights are just set up for that very limited space that we’re operating in. It allows you to shoot fast.
Nikki: That’s amazing because, exactly, you don’t need to stop and relight every time you’re going to reposition or, yes. The only thing that you would stop and it is just to put the different physical objects that you would need, like for the next set, but still, it’s not a huge space.
Scott: Sometimes that gets pretty involved. Also in the case of this jungle we did, and I can send you some pictures of it, we had a lot of plants in there because the characters are doing this chase through the jungle. They have to be running past real plants that they’re interacting with and hitting. There are a lot of real plants in the foreground and the mid ground and in the shallow background. Then the deep space is that wall that extends into infinity and really makes you believe that you’re in this giant outdoor environment. Art department, it’s not like it’s putting art department out of business.
They still have a lot of work to, bring in, bring in, if you’re shooting in a home, you have to have some real furniture, for the actors to sit on and interact with. You have to have some practical lamps and things that are in the frame or else it wouldn’t look real. Then the only objects in the house would be way back there then the illusion is broken.
Nikki: Yes, exactly. I see another huge advantage is that if you’re shooting exterior, you don’t have to stop every time there’s an airplane flying or an emergency vehicle going by or a lawnmower.
Scott: In the case of, here in Texas, it gets close to freezing and the whole, the whole state shuts down. We can’t even handle it. It’s so cold. Everybody freaks out. It’s funny that shooting here in January, I did think about that there have been times where usually the weather’s pretty good in Austin where I live. Sometimes it’s supposed to be a sunny day and the commercial or whatever you’re shooting calls for a sunny day and then it’s pouring rain and cloudy. It’s awesome how you can, you can be inside in the comfort and actually in Texas it’s really the heat that becomes the big problem, shooting in the summer outside.
Yes. I was shooting a campaign in August. It was 112 degrees and we’re all just miserable, and so the idea of being in an outdoor environment but in the comfort of a stage is so cool. Not only that, an outdoor environment that looks utterly real, Then let’s say you’re shooting at sunset too, if you were using a real sunset you got 15 minutes of the good light. All right, let’s hurry up and do this dramatic scene. We only got 15 minutes. Better get it right. You can shoot a few hours on the– you can shoot as long as you want on a virtual production stage because that beautiful sunset’s just going to sit there as long as you need it to. There’s a lot of advantages.
Nikki: That is beautiful. Do more and more production companies going into virtual production?
Scott: Yes. It’s getting really, so the stage I’m shooting on is called Stray Vista and it’s getting really busy. My understanding since we shot the short film I did, which was a demo to show other filmmakers how you could use this technology and to tell filmmakers that, hey, this technology is not just available to John Favreau and the people at Disney and Star Wars shows that independent filmmakers can use this. In fact the folks who did the backgrounds on the Star Wars shows, they did the backgrounds for my short film. They’re called Narwhal Studios and they did it.
Nikki: Oh, that’s them.
Scott: Yes, they did it because they want to make this technology accessible to anybody, not just the big expensive shows. That’s really cool. I think that’s starting to catch on and you’re starting to see more films and commercials that aren’t necessarily huge budget use this technology, but it’s just, it’s getting to the point where it’s more accessible now.
Nikki: I’m happy to hear that. You don’t have to have a huge budget to be able to use that technology.
Scott: No, it’s not. It’s not like, I think that, yes, a few years ago, yes, when it was brand new and it was experimental, but it’s really starting to get perfected. Then these virtual production stages are starting to pop up regionally across the country, like in Las Vegas and Atlanta. I think there’s one in Dallas, there’s one here in Austin and everybody’s getting in on the action because it’s just, it’s really cool. It’s comfortable. Now there are some things that make it tricky. For example, you have to do, there’s a lot more work in pre-production because you have to build the environment.
You don’t get to just go to a location and say, well, I guess that’s it. That’s what we have to live with. We’ll build our shots around this location. You in advance have to go, well, what are the shots I want? How do I want to cover the action and what is the action? Then you build the environment around the story you want to tell, the shots, where the characters are moving and all that good stuff. You have to have answers for the person who is building that 3D virtual environment, how the room should be laid out, which way do we want to be looking, all that good stuff.
Then the DP has to work with the person who’s building the unreal engine virtual environment, and they have to decide on the lighting that’s going to be in the virtual environment and make sure that it’s going to match what the cinematographer is going to do on the stage itself with the actors and some of the set dressing that’s actually there practically on set.
Nikki: Would you say from start, like from pre-production to post-production, the whole thing would be now with virtual production, less time for the whole project to be done?
Scott: I think it evens out. I think it’s a similar timeline. For example, the commercial campaign that I’m prepping right now, we have the same amount of time, about two, three weeks to do heavy pre-pro. That’s about the same time we would have had if we were shooting in a practical location. We could have shot in a practical location. I just decided, hey, let’s do it virtually. Then that allowed the ad agency to adjust the scripts to be a little bit more ambitious in terms of the environments we were shooting in. I think it evens out where, I think it speeds things up is if you are like, for example, shooting on a moonscape or something.
You got an astronaut who’s in a space suit and they’re walking on a moonscape. If you were going to do that as a visual effect, you’d have to do green screen and then all that would be in post. All the compositing, the building of the moon landscape, that would be in post. That would take a lot of time and also cost a chunk of money, right? If you did the moonscape virtually, you’d pre-build all that. On the post side, you’d have to do all
this compositing.
It would be captured in cameras as if that actor was actually on the moon, and you really shot it with a camera. Then you don’t have to do anything in the post. You use some, obviously, you go into color correction. That helps sell the virtual production a little bit more but you’re doing color correction anyway. It does save time and money on the visual effects side of the equation in post.
Nikki: We’ve reached the end of part one. Please join us next week for part two and the conclusion of this interview. In the meantime, if you can think of anyone who might benefit from this information, please go ahead and share it with them. Thanks for being here.
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