Amazon Studios Unveils Biggest U.S. LED Wall Virtual-Production Stage

The arms race among facilities providing virtual production capabilities, considered the next generation of film and TV creation, escalated another step this week with Amazon Studios officially unveiling what it calls the largest LED wall stage in the United States.

The drum-shaped stage is 80 feet in diameter, and 26 feet high, a foot shorter than a Vancover stage considered the world’s largest so far.

Producer/director Reginald Hudlin (House Party, multiple Oscar, Emmy and NAACP Image Award telecasts) cut the ribbon inaugurating the stage at a kick-off party Monday night. Hudlin’s upcoming Amazon Studios feature Candy Cane Lane, starring Eddie Murphy, will be the stage’s first official project, with several scenes planned for shooting within the LED wall’s stage.

“They’ve really been partners walking alongside us,” Hudlin said. “It’s wonderful walking alongside a studio partner with resources like this.”

Amazon executives also made much of the facility’s tight integration with Amazon’s cloud-computing division, AWS, as it builds an asset-management system to simplify and speed production and post-production. Performances captured on the stage are directly piped into AWS’ S3 cloud storage and immediately made available as dailies for executive review, editing, color grading, visual effects and other post-production work.

Virtual production first made a splash in 2019 with Disney’s The Mandalorian and a live-action remake of The Lion King. Producer/actor/director Jon Favreau was behind both projects, whose convincing imagery and dynamic creative potential sent more forward-thinking creators in Hollywood diving into the possibilities for their own work.

That said, even as facilities roll out, most judge that the new technologies are still in their infancy, in part because so few Hollywood creators have yet fully embraced the possibilities amid the pandemic’s lingering impacts. The pandemic spurred the stage’s creation, said Chris del Conte, global head of VFX for Amazon Studios, because the company needed to find ways to create new projects safely, quickly and affordably.

Amazon’s decision to open its own stage should have a big impact on virtual production in general, given that it’s creating projects for Prime Video, Freevee, the recently acquired MGM Studios and premium network MGM+ (formerly Epix), and even co-productions with other studios for shows such as The Boys.

Such LED walls are helping transform how film, TV and streaming shows can be made, allowing instantly transformable backdrops to appear behind actors using appropriate “parallax” perspective that matches the backdrop on screen with actors as seen for a given lens, camera, and angle of filming.

The high-resolution backdrops provide much more realistic lighting than previous-generation green screens, which spill that green light on performers that must be removed in post-production, said Ken Nakada, Amazon’s head of virtual production operations. Backdrops must then be added digitally after the fact, in a process that can take weeks or months of expensive work.

With green screens, “Actors had to be told what they’re acting in,” Nakada said. With virtual production tools like LED volumes, “On-set direction, all production creatives, create in the moment.”

With the Amazon stage, lighting and backdrops can be quickly changed, using a handheld iPad with a special external frame that allows its position to be tracked and matched onto the LED wall. Lighting can be further augmented in the space with up to 350,000 lbs. of overhead lights in place of the hundreds of ceiling LED panels on the stage.

Because the system creates backdrops using the Unreal game engine from Epic Games, they are interactive, and can be controlled with the same hand-held device even as performers work. And it’s simple to change the light for a different time of day, or weather, or other factors, del Conte said during a demonstration.

The facility integrates the technologies of several partner vendors, including Unreal, Lux Machina NEP Virtual Studios, Fuse Technical Group, 209 Group, and Grip Nation. Del Conte said Amazon wanted to build on widely used tools already familiar throughout the industry when putting together its stage.

The mammoth Amazon stage can be enclosed with two large movable panels, or extended outward in a keyhole shape some 60 feet to allow for extremely long dolly shots, del Conte said.

Company executives also emphasized they want to make the space available for directors, cinematographers and other filmmakers to try out the tools of virtual production to see what might be possible for their own projects.

The Stage 15 facilities also will include a “Sandbox” lab, a two-story building inside the stage that will include a virtual location-scouting space, performance capture area, tech scouting space, and a green screen simulcam stage where closeup shots can be layered into bigger LED walls.

“We’re trying to make a safe place for filmmakers to be ambitious,” said del Conte. “A large part of what they do (at the new stage) is provide education, mix the world of AWS and ASVP to really dream big.”

Other facilities in Stage 15 will include a smaller second LED stage, a mobile LED wall, camera tracking, an engineering workshop and more.

Attendees at the event ranged from investor Robert Stromberg, who was director of Maleficent and production designer for Avatar, to the film and videogame teachers at Culver City High School among more than 100 attendees.

Amazon is far from the only company trying to integrate virtual production and cloud tools into filmmaking.

The stage was built over the past two years in one part of an even more cavernous sound stage, part of those Amazon rents on a long-term basis at the MBS Group’s Culver Studios in Culver City, Calif., a Los Angeles suburb.

Down the street, Sony Pictures Entertainment has outfitted its own production facilities with LED walls.

Sony Electronics’ Bravia line of LED panels are also one of the building blocks for other organizations diving into the sector, including the nearby University of Southern California, which recently announced its School of Cinematic Arts is building an LED wall in its sound stages.

In nearby Hawthorne, camera-tracking company Mo-Sys runs what it calls “The Refinery,” to educate directors, cinematographers and others on the technology’s potential. Mo-Sys also runs a larger virtual-production facility in London.

AdobeADBE
has been making its own substantive push into cloud integration with video production through its Frame.io acquisition. Tonight, Adobe is celebrating its Camera-to-Cloud technology at an event a couple of blocks from the Amazon stage, at the historic Culver Hotel.

Blackmagic Design announced virtual collaboration tools for its do-everything DaVinci Resolve program, which includes industry-standard color-grading tools. Resolve is also part of the integrated offerings at the Amazon stage.

The Culver Studios Stage 15 dates to 1940, and has been home to many prominent productions in previous iterations of its existence, including notable Hollywood productions such as It’s a Wonderful Life, the Star Trek and Batman TV shows, Robocop, Airplane, The Three Amigos, and Armageddon.

The company also showed a sizzle video that features the new facility’s capabilities: