London’s Garden Studios has unveiled what it describes as the facility’s most advanced virtual production stage to date.
The new stage features a fully motorised LED ceiling featuring a 2.6mm pixel pitch panel from Absen. The ceiling can tilt up to 90 degrees to operate as a front LED wall, creating a full 360-degree volume, and can travel up to 18 metres front to back, allowing rapid reconfiguration from a fully enclosed ceiling to a rain-ready setup. The ceiling area has also been doubled compared to the previous stage.
The stage has been designed to meet the increased use of virtual production for driving process work, and is able to accommodate a wide range of vehicles, from cars and motorcycles to large stunt vehicles, buses and specialist transport.
According to the company, the stage layout reduces vehicle repositioning, with approximately 90 per cent of camera angles achievable using a single 180-degree rotation, significantly reducing downtime between setups.
The stage’s configuration includes independently controlled lighting trusses, mounted on a system of rails and motors, allowing fixtures to be positioned above, around and beneath the LED ceiling. All systems are pre-wired for power and data, enabling fast and efficient rigging.
Garden Studio’s VP supervisor, Sam Kemp, said: “Lighting integration is key to selling simulated travel on a volume. The new stage provides a bespoke image-based lighting workflow that plugs into existing control desks. This allows Garden to replicate a wide range of lighting states, from inner-city neon night to hard sunlight on a winding country lane.”
The stage supports a wide range of Unreal Engine-based real-time workflows, said the company.
