Tampa Republic

Most undergraduates who pursue film and media are familiar with the limitations of student set design: the reliance on repurposed backdrops, scant resources for creating intricate scenes and minimal access to locales beyond what’s readily available in the neighborhood. 

But thanks to a generous gift to UT’s Department of Film, Animation and New Media, students can now produce whatever their imaginations can dream up. Back in April, Vu, a local virtual production company, presented the department with an LED “volume” — a massive, curved screen that connects to a computer and can be used to create virtual backdrops. The technology (plus training at Vu) is valued at $750,000, but the world it opens up for students? That’s priceless.

That’s because these LED volumes are arguably the most cutting-edge technology in the film industry right now — and present the future of where the entertainment industry (not to mention fields like medicine, aerospace, the military and more) are headed. While they vary in size, the volume on campus is 13.1 feet tall by 29.5 feet wide and is made up of 72 interlocked panels. (For you tech geeks out there: That’s 2.4 million total pixels!) 

“LED volumes are taking the world by storm, and for our students, it’s truly unlocked their creative potential,” says Gregg Perkins, associate professor of film, animation and new media. Perkins has been central to the relationship between Vu and UT, and he led the first-ever class involving the new technology — a weekly, four-hour, collaborative, workshop-style course called Virtual Production.

The overarching benefits of LED volumes are twofold: For one, they allow actors to be more fully immersed in a scene in which they’re acting (as opposed to having to act in front of a green or blue screen, which for decades has been the de facto way to create digital backdrops). For another, they allow filmmakers to create quite literally any setting they can imagine — without having to deal with the cost (and carbon footprint) of traveling to far-flung sets or waiting all day for the perfect sunset or lighting (or anything else that’s out of human control).

“You can move from the Sahara Desert in the morning to Iceland in the afternoon,” says Perkins. One of the most well-known current examples of the power of volume technology is The Mandalorian, the Emmy award-winning Disney+ TV series that is set in the “outer reaches of the galaxy.”

One person who certainly understands how special these screens is Hannah Sam ’23, from Lake Worth, FL, who participated in Perkins’ class last spring. She says the technology has “completely changed the game and how we view things here.” Last semester, she and her peers were able to create a series of films set in locales as diverse as a dungeon, a village, a jungle and a temple. 

“As student filmmakers, a lot of the time if you want to create something, you’re limited by your financial status or what you can physically build. But now, we could write a whole medieval elf sequence if we wanted, because we have this incredible technology at our disposal,” she says. 

As another student eloquently put it to Perkins during class: “Now, I can write a screenplay set on the moon!”

CREATING THE PIPELINE

Vu is actually an outgrowth of another company, Diamond View Studios, founded by Tim Moore 14 years ago as a video production company. For years, the company focused mainly on commercial work. 

Then, the pandemic hit. No longer able to travel to their distant clients, Moore and his team went into problem-solving mode. “How do we get the location to travel to us?” they wondered. The answer was LED volumes, which they began selling under a sub-brand, Vu. Within a year, Vu had outperformed Diamond View Studios, and its growth has only continued to explode. 

The company now has studios with volumes set up in Tampa, Orlando, Nashville and Las Vegas. And they have clients in cities from Naples, FL, all the way up to Toronto. “It’s been a very interesting evolution in that we didn’t expect it to be this successful, but it’s taken off like a rocket ship,” Moore says. 

Original source can be found here.