PUMPING UP THE VOLUME
New technology is changing the way movies are made
There is a romance to movie locations. People's desire to see where their favourite films or TV programs were made has spawned a whole industry. You can take a Muggle tour or a Game of Thrones tour. Enjoy these quirks of connection with the films and shows you love because their time is short. Movie locations will soon be a thing of the past thanks to the Volume, the high-tech successor to the “green screen” that's becoming a fixture at every major studio. A two-storey cylinder made out of LED panels, the Volume was developed by Industrial Light and Magic, director George Lucas's special effects company, and puts actors inside a 21st-century version of a Greek cyclorama.
Instead of vast sets or exotic locations, the Volume allows directors to conjure up computer-generated backdrops that “paint” the walls with fabricated worlds giving a constantly moving real-time backdrop.
Where Star Wars feature films have been shot on massive sets occupying large sound stages at Pinewood, supplemented with location work in Tunisia or Ireland, the Star Wars spinoff The Mandalorian was shot in a Volume on an L.A. stage not much bigger than a warehouse. For producers and actors, this is the future.
It was production problems on a Star Wars film that originally inspired the new technology. Filming 2018's Solo, scenes had to be re-shot after actors sitting in the cockpit of a spaceship struggled to react to the amazing spectacle of the fictitious Kessel Run, when all they could see was a green wall. (They were not the first actors to bemoan the ubiquity of the “green screen” — Ian Mckellan broke down in tears while filming the Hobbit due to the constant green screening, wailing “this is not why I became an actor.”)
Ewan Mcgregor, who played Obi-wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequels between 1999 and 2005, sympathizes.
“After three or four months, it just gets really tedious. You're talking to tennis balls, which will ultimately be alien creatures. Especially when the scenes are ... I don't want to be rude, but it's not Shakespeare. There's not something to dig into in the dialogue that can satisfy you when there's no environment there.”
Now, Mcgregor is loving playing Obi-wan in the eponymous series on Disney+ as every scene is filmed inside a Volume — as was every scene in The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett and the forthcoming Ahsoka.
“It's just such a game-changer for actors,” Mcgregor said recently. “We were in this amazing set where, if you're shooting in the desert, everywhere you look is the desert, and if you're flying through space, the stars are flying past you — it's so cool. It's like the beginning of Hollywood, when they had three-sided sets all in a row, and you would just go from one stage to the other. We're doing sort of the same thing, except just the background changes instead of the stage. And you don't have to fly. Ever. I just want to stay at home, drive to work and have a proper job.”
Since The Mandalorian, the technology has been used in the latest Batman film — with an especially impressive take on Gotham City — George Clooney's Midnight Sky, Thor: Love and Thunder, and even the apparently lo-fi How I Met Your Father, a sitcom about dating in New York, also on Disney +.
The show stars Hilary Duff and according to showrunners Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger, the virtual set was an ideal and much cheaper alternative to flying Duff and the cast to New York to film. The virtual stage was able to re-create the Brooklyn Bridge without the rest of New York getting in the way.
“Ironically, the Volume was designed partly to cut costs but actually makes more expensive green screening look cheap,” says Ed Waller, editorial director of trade bible C21 Media. “Marvel films have used it — but the TV shows definitely haven't and there was a huge fan backlash over the CGI on (the Marvel series) She-hulk when the trailer was released ...”
Similar systems using LED screens and different software are proliferating. Warner Bros. shot its Game of Thrones prequel at Leavesden in the U.K. using its “virtual production stage,” while German directors Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar created a Teutonically superior version for their forthcoming mystery-horror show 1899, which included rain sprinklers, a revolving stage and two different tracking systems. Scenes on ships, in deserts, in Poland and Scotland were all shot essentially in front of a giant LED TV at Studio Babelsberg, the home of Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
The pandemic has given this tech a huge boost. David Attenborough's recent Prehistoric Planet on Apple TV+, directed by Jon Favreau, involved crews from the BBC'S Natural History Unit filming locations with a Cretaceous period vibe around the world then feeding them into the Volume, where convincing dinosaurs acted out the latest theories on the creature's behaviour. As soon as lockdown hit, they had to work with sites in the Lake District and give them a touch-up in the computer.
There will always be holdouts. Tom Cruise famously refuses to use green screen, as Youtube footage of him abseiling down the Burj Khalifa in Dubai demonstrates. Top Gun: Maverick was green screen- and Volume-free. Miles Teller said Cruise “wanted all actors to be in the jets.”
There's a handful of directors who agree — including Christopher Nolan. For Dunkirk, he had up to 60 ships in The Channel including the French destroyer, the Maille-brez — a museum piece from Nantes that had to be towed using a pair of tugs.
If he had shot that in the Volume, you probably wouldn't have noticed the difference. But doesn't it sound so much cooler that the little boats were actual originals used in the real Dunkirk evacuation and were piloted by the owners? For movies to be great they have to be a bit fake, but it's the reality that makes them magical.