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Virtual Production: How Engineering is Helping Streamline Film Production

Pavan Garidipuri
8 min readAug 8, 2021

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Introduction

Cinema has always been a larger-than-life viewing experience. Attracting a massive and diverse audience, from starry-eyed children to seasoned critics, cinema has grown into a 136 billion dollar industry [1]. From the inception of the movie camera, filmmakers have combined their artistic visions with sophisticated engineering to break technical barriers and bring their ambitious stories to life. Over decades, the film industry has helped develop new technologies that revolutionized content creation for decades and across many countries. Currently, one technology is reshaping the workflow of film production: Virtual Production. Virtual Production is a filmmaking process that mixes live footage and computer graphics to get real-time feedback and make decisions on set about the visual effects and animation, instead of doing it after filming. From movies like Ready Player One to shows like The Mandalorian, Virtual Production enabled efficient and collaborative workflows for visual effects, setting it to become an industry norm by 2026 [2]. Getting to this paradigm of production required decades of artistic visions matched with engineering prowess. As more studios adopt Virtual Production to turn their increasingly ambitious projects into reality, engineers will need to make Virtual Production workflow…

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Pavan Garidipuri
Pavan Garidipuri

Written by Pavan Garidipuri

Programmer, designer, filmmaker, and contemplator at USC’s Iovine and Young Academy

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