To get the most accurate depiction of a scene, many filmmakers travel miles away to film on location. However, with new technology, creators can create settings from anywhere in the world without moving. With the cutting-edge virtual production stage, Salt Lake City Community College filmmakers, aspiring and professional, can do that, changing the shape of film making. 

A 31-foot-wide by 18-foot-high wall composed of LED panels, the Taylor Virtual Production Stage offers an immersive experience for filmmakers and viewers without the use of a green screen. 

“The project started two years ago and we proposed that we embrace this new technology that is essentially replacing green screen technology,” said SLCC documentary professor Tyler Smith. “That process is very cumbersome because you have to—there's nothing to really interact with. The actor has to really imagine what's happening.

“So this new technology is a massive screen that replaces that green screen and you put the image on while you're doing the production and so now the actors have a real environment to interact with and then they also have a layer of luminance that's reflecting on them and so the actual environment like with the color and intensity reflects back onto the actor and so it feels real and it looks real,” Smith said. 

The virtual production stage is now the newest of three stages at Salt Lake Community College’s School of Arts, Communication & Media (SACM).  

“We've had our main sound stage; we now have three sound stages as a community college. One is a television broadcast television stage, the other one is an actual film stage where we shoot movies and build sets, and then the other, the third one that we just gained access to,” said Channing Lowe, an associate professor of film production who has been teaching at SLCC for nearly two decades.

“The school had some excess funding that they were trying to find a project, I guess a worthy project, to put money into. We've been seeing virtual production happening for some time….We didn't know how to do it necessarily, but we knew that it was kind of a—it was basically a growing industry where there weren’t enough professionals to kind of fill the need for that, because a lot of movies are now during virtual production,” Lowe said.

With popular movies and television shows like “Black Panther” and “The Mandalorian” using virtual production stages, it inspires SLCC film students to adapt to a growing technology that can offer photorealistic environments where filmmakers can shoot their scenes and build set extensions in front of it, making it look like those in front of the camera are in a totally different physical or geographical location. 

“The Unreal Engine is what we used. It's a video game engine that's gotten to the point where they can make it look fairly photorealistic by creating these 3D environments that project on the wall, and then you'll put the camera in front of the wall and the software will know where the camera is,” Lowe said. “It was just over $1 million to basically renovate the stage and purchase the materials for the LED wall.”

“It took about two years to plan,” said Smith, who, along with some of his students, has been using the wall for his documentary class, shooting interviews using several different background environments.

Since the fall semester, classes for the Taylor Virtual Production Stage have been filling up immediately with students eager to work on their projects using the wall.

“There's one short film that they built an actual space module thing where people are sitting inside and they shot drone footage to go on the LED wall. From the perspective of the camera inside the space module, it looks like they're actually flying. It looked really, really nice,” Lowe said. 

Getting acquainted with the new state-of-the-art technology did not come without some external aid, as virtual production stage experts such as Jake Dickey from Redman Movies & Stories have come in to assist SLCC faculty and students. 

“[Jake Dickey’s] been great in helping us, advising us on how to get the wall set up and also teaching those specific classes,” Lowe said. “Right now, there is a need and demand for people who know that technology, and right now, there's not very many people that know that technology very well.” 

With the Taylor Virtual Production Stage, there are many new plans and goals for Salt Lake City Community College, setting a new and exciting chapter for the film and media department. 

“Our goal with the school is to get students trained to where they can get jobs on virtual productions, so they can be technicians in that field. The other goal is to get more classes, and we're working with Jake Dickey to basically develop more classes for teaching virtual production,” Lowe said. “I'm still learning a lot on it. I feel like I've just kind of scratched the surface.”λ