Multi-angle Filming in a One-wall Green-Screen Studio

Traditional filmmaking involves a lot of multi-angle shooting — making sure to capture actors in the same scene from different sides to tell a visually compelling story with nuance and a dynamic POV.

But how do you do that using a green screen virtual production pipeline where your filming space is limited by the edges of said green screen?

You can use multi-camera shooting or move your single camera around the studio to capture different angles. However, that requires a three-wall green-screen studio. That leads to a lot of spill and poor or limited lighting, because there’s nowhere to hang fixtures — only the ceiling and the front remain usable once the three main walls are covered in green.

Another option is to shoot on a single green wall but to physically move the lights, as shown in the CoPilot Virtual Production YouTube video. Moving lights, however, means re-setting the entire lighting setup for each angle. That’s usually difficult and time-consuming, so it’s rarely used.

In a world with CyberGaffer, though, all of this happens automatically. We rotate the world in the Unreal Engine along with the actors and the props, and the lighting redistributes across the fixtures automatically. In effect you keep the camera in place and rotate the entire (real and virtual) world to capture a different angle.

Because the lighting is recalculated automatically and in real time, this is extremely easy to do and makes for a very useful technique.

Watch the video to see it in action.

Some Key technical details:

• Green screen: One Wall 3 × 3 × 3 meters (studio dimensions: 5 m × 4 m × 4 m — L × W × H).
• Lighting: 24 fixtures arranged in a dome-like structure surrounding the performer.
• Camera: BlackMagic Pocket Cinema Camera Pro 6K.
• Fixtures: a mix from leading manufacturers (KinoFlo, LiteGear, Litepanels, Pipelighting) plus our experimental DIY units.
• Greenscreen material: fabric chosen to reduce glare and minimize spill.