Virtual Production Supervisor – Brassic – Season 6 Finale

Calamity Films, the producers of the SkyTV series, Brassic, initially came to me with the impression that they could use virtual production for a cliff-edge shot they had planned,  only if they could find a stage with a high enough ceiling to house the crane that would suspend the bus.

After reassuring them that a crane would not be necessary, I set up a quick test with a car and a 360 plate of a cliff edge.  The results spoke for themselves, and the producers realised we could get the result a different way. No huge stunt set-ups, no expensive crane hire….just a very efficient VP workflow.

The next step was to go and shoot a 360 plate at the location the production had chosen. The initial location was a diving centre in the Lake District.  After processing the plates and putting them on the wall to test, it was clear that the height of the cliff was not high enough to convey a real sense or mortal danger. The next location solved that problem.

The location was a place called Troy Quarry. It has been used in a number of productions but probably most famously, in a scene from Peaky Blinders, with Cillian Murphy sitting on a horse, looking over the precipice of the cliff edge.

I shot a 10K plate using an Insta 360 Titan. For this particular task the camera was a good choice. I knew that in the studio we’d be building an LED wall that went around most of the bus, so I need a camera that gave a decently high resolution. After the shoot I stitched the footage using Mistika VR.

For 2D plate playback in an LED volume, I always use Aximmetry. It’s an incredibly versatile software that also has a built in version of Unreal Engine. For 2D playback I don’t need the UE capability though. Aximmetry offers an amazing amount of control of the image that is being displayed on the LED wall and its particularly useful when playing back car driving plates. Position, scale, colour, contrast and many more things can be controlled very easily via Aximmetry. I couldn’t recommend it highly enough.

On the day of the shoot, everything went extremely well. I had mapped the 360 footage onto a sphere inside Aximmetry, and achieved the illusion of the bus tipping over the end of the cliff by keyframing the X rotation of the sphere. It worked that well that the actors were getting off the bus feeling a bit of motion sickness.

The DoP chose to go handheld with the camera, a Sony Venice, and that really helped create the final image.

At the end of day 1, the bus was removed, the LED wall was broken down and rebuilt in a configuration that better suited the playback of car plates that were required for the remaining driving sequences. 

Overall, it was a very successful shoot.