Academy Award-winning director Steven Soderbergh has employed virtual production for his new TV miniseries Full Circle, which premiered on MAX yesterday.
Soderbergh used the RDX LAB System from Rosco with Software by FuseFX on the series, which is the first-ever production to use the virtual production technology.
The RDX System combines FuseFX’s VFX software with Rosco’s extensive digital content library to give cinematographers more choice on set, granting access to high-resolution cinematic backdrops that can be adjusted and displayed in real-time on any LED volume.
Full Circle was the first production to deploy the RDX System, enabling it to manipulate background imagery instantly, via an app.
The backdrop images seen on the show were displayed on a 180-foot flat LED wall and required a purpose-built system that could support the virtual set. Teams from Carstage and Visual Alchemy supported the RDX System and enabled the near-instant display and scale-up of images onto the LED screen.
The RDX System significantly reduced the time and cost typically associated with constructing environments in pre-production, said Rosco, and also saved time during post production.
“It’s changed the way that I think about conceptualising scenes and story,” said Soderbergh. “That’s the way technology is supposed to work. It’s supposed to unleash your imagination as opposed to scaling down your ideas to what’s possible at that moment in time. I’m thinking about doing things now that I wouldn’t have thought about doing before.
“We’re really in a space where you have the freedom to imagine things. My horizons have expanded just due to technology like this. I can move at the speed that I want to move and do things visually I’ve never been able to do before.”
