It's been UNREAL!

#Unreal Engine

My Metahuman @ "The Wall" in the long Summer

This year was a research and development year at PAITAN Media. We focused on learning about different emerging technology in the film industry to be leveraged to improve storytelling. Recently, there has been a buzz in the industry about virtual production with LED walls/volumes springing up around the globe . Virtual production is a technology for television and film production in which LED screens are used as a backdrop for a set. If you are new to virtual production, check out this link to learn more.

At PAITAN media, we were definitely blown away by what was achieved with virtual production in Disney's Mandalorion series. And, though we knew it would take our young company some time to be able to deploy the type of production budget required to leverage LED walls,, we still thought it was useful to understand the technology and research lower cost alternatives to LED walls.

Delving into into the fundamentals of virtual production, we learned that the virtual production leverages game engine technology for real time rendering, Unreal Engine, a game engine by Epic Games is used in many virtual production systems. The beauty of using Unreal Engine is that it is free to use for film production, provides real time rendering of 3D environments and supports 3rd party plugins for camera tracking so you can control your virtual camera with your real world camera. There are many platforms for learning Unreal Engine. A great starting point would be the EPIC Developer Community Learning.

At PAITAN media, we have been experimenting Unreal Engine and learning how to use it in film production. We have been able to identify lower cost virtual production options using green screens and live compositing for pre-visualisation. We have also been able to identify lower cost camera tracking options to control the virtual camera.

There are many possibilities with Unreal Engine. From world building for film production to animation using motion capture, the possibilities are endless. For us as PAITAN media, It's been an UNREAL experience.

You'll get to experience it too in our first short film "Revelation" where we'll be utilising Unreal Engine to build the world of our story.