Grid Legends

Commissioned by Codemasters and directed by Alan Leech at SPOV, I was cinematographer and technical consultant for the in-game film which followed a choose your own story style narrative. Working with the director for three months before principal photography, we designed a custom triangular shaped virtual production set that enabled us to shoot with a fast documentary style whilst utilising the benefits of virtual production LED screens.

Due to the large volume of sets and scenes required to be shot in four weeks I created an animatic for each scene with a layered breakdown showing the what elements where physical and virtual, this was also combined with an orthographic map of the set. This enabled us to realistically visualise the look and feel of each scene, moreover it enabled physical production and Unreal level designers to see what elements they where responsible for and allowed the team to check the real and Unreal world matched on set.

Main credits

Client: Codemasters

Game Director: Chris Smith

Director: Allen Leitch / SPOV

Producer: Phil Tidy / Astrid Edwards

Virtual Production : MARS Studios

Virtual Production Producer : Ben Fender

Gaffer: Leopold Naessens

Production Designer: Felicity Hickson

Costume Designer: Liam Bunster

Editor: Ben Unwin

Here you can see the style of animatic I produced for each of the 35 scenes we shot. The first part shows the camera view with the real, virtual and combined plates. Then we have the overhead and finally the finished scene.

This kind animatic gave each department a clear view of their responsibilities and allowed production to accurately schedule departments.

The unique tri-walled XR Stage I designed specifically for this project. The design of the screen layout was critical to shooting a ‘shot - reverse shot’ style documentary. Another major factor in this design was creating enough space for prop installation and space to light the scenes off set without any light spill onto the LED surface. For example, we used Tungsten daylight fixtures a long distance off set to provide a realistic shadow on real objects that matched the shadow contouring in the virtual world.