About the film
“A fishermans friend” is a virtual production project from the Netherlands film academy. The story is about a fisherman in a post apocalypses world who has to choose between surviving of having a better life.
Real-time changes
In a film set, time is everything. Especially on a virtual production set. Making changes to the Unreal scene can take up precieus time, so I made a system to reduce this time.
This system was build upon Unreal’s remote control API. The tablet app could control a lot of aspects of the scene. Most importantly, the sky.
The sky environment was an important part of the film. The diffident types of clouds resemble the different states of the main character. Having full control over it was key. Of course we designed several sky’s on the prelight days, but we quickly noticed that that was not enough. Together with the lighting team we changed the sky to fit the specific shot. The fact that I, the volume operator, could stand next to the director and make changes in real time helped infinitely.
“Hey, can we move the sun a little to the right?”
That was something that we heard a few times during the shoot. On a normal set, that would be ridiculous. But with the tablet in my had, it’s just a matter of seconds.
Building the volume
Together with four other student’s I build the LED wall. We had a wall with a width of 8 meters and a height of 4 meters. The wall had a 3 degree curve. After we build it, we had to calibrate every panel and remove all the edges. Building the physical wall took one full day. After that we had 3 days to build the data and power lines needed to use the wall.
