Dallas City Wire

ASU teaches tech used in 'The Mandalorian' to film school students

Virtual production, using giant LED screens, is the future of the industryAudiences who are streaming the current season of “The Mandalorian” have seen the main characters fly through space and probe the murky mines of Mandalore thanks to the ground-breaking virtual-production technology that was invented for the show.Virtual production not only generates richly detailed sets that are displayed on gigantic LED screens rather than blank green screens, it also saves money by making production more efficient and accurate. Since “The Mandalorian” debuted in 2019, the technology has also been used in the movies “Dune” and “The Batman.”Now, students at Arizona State University have access to this cutting-edge technology to tell their own stories. The Sidney Poitier New American Film School offers virtual-production technology with extremely high-resolution LED wall and floor screens made by Planar Studios at the ASU California Center in downtown Los Angeles.The Media and Immersive eXperience Center in downtown Mesa will offer the technology starting in the fall semester, according to Jake Pinholster, founding director of the MIX Center and executive dean in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.“In a few short years this has become one of the most explosive and transformative trends in the movie production industry because it has huge positive ramifications,” he said.“It cuts on post-production time. It makes it easier to pre-visualize and know what a shot will look like before you turn on the camera,” he said.“Actors can see the environment and respond to it. You can shoot a dawn scene all day long.”Industrial Light and Magic, the special-effects production company founded by George Lucas, released a video explaining how it created the technology for “The Mandalorian” so that the world-building can be adjusted in real time and saved. The method streamlines the work that was previously done in the pre-production, production and post-production timelines.The environments are created digitally and loaded onto the giant screens, where the actors can interact with what the audience will see. Previously, actors would work in front of a blank green screen and the digital effects would be added during post-production.Because ASU is the only film school offering the technology, Pinholster and Nonny de la Peña, founding director of ASU’s Narrative and Emerging Media program, are helping to set standards for teaching the method. They are on a working group of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.“To a certain degree, there is no industry standard in how to do this because it’s still very much an experimental process,” Pinholster said.“We are one of the first universities training people in what will become the major production technique.”

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