For Spencer Idenouye, Virtual Production Lead at SIRT, the Unreal Fellowship program was the perfect way to train. “It was a fantastic opportunity,” he remembers. “In five weeks, I was able to construct a short film almost entirely using Unreal Engine and Unreal Marketplace assets. Participating in this sort of exercise, while documenting the process along the way, helped me to gain an in-depth understanding of the skills needed for virtual production.” 

Planning Your Curriculum

The top seven topics to teach VP students

With a technology that spans across as many applications as virtual production, it can be challenging to decide what to teach. Here are the most important topics to cover:1. The fundamentals: It’s critical for anyone working with VP to understand the correlation between film production concepts and their game engine equivalents. That means learning about editing, directing, acting, and composition. “Learning VP does not mean you don’t have to know how to make movies,” adds Flanagan.

2. On-set lighting: Learning about lighting is also essential for VP students to create realistic backgrounds. “Matching the lighting of the physical foreground to the virtual background really brings everything together,” says Joerg Schodl, Cinematographer at SCAD.

3. Scheduling and production: Virtual production is making the industry re-evaluate pipelines that have been in place for decades. When VFX no longer happens in post, planning needs to be airtight. That’s why VP students need to learn everything they can about scheduling and production.

4. Virtual design: It’s not enough to teach students about onset filmmaking. They need to learn about CG too in order to create and prep content for real-time environments. “It’s important to teach students how 3D assets are built for both static meshes and skeletal-based characters through geometry, materials, rigging, blendshapes, and more,” explains Spencer Idenouye, Virtual Production Lead at SIRT.

5. Stage operations: In LED VP, the setup and engineering of the LED wall including color calibration, nDisplay setup, and more is critical. For students, learning the basics of how these work will give them a deeper understanding of what goes on behind the scenes.

6. Performance capture and camera tracking: If you want to animate 3D characters in real-time, or film actors on the moon, you need to learn all things mocap. Students should know how to ensure cameras are properly calibrated, which solutions they can use for streaming mocap data into Unreal Engine, and understand facial capture work.

7. Visual scripting: Familiarity with game logic and mechanics will help students develop or customize tools that will support their virtual production projects, and help them solve complex problems once they move into the industry.

Source: Unreal Engine Blog