Real Time Filmmaking

This year the Sundance film festival co-host a event with the Unity3D game engine company to explore the idea of real time filmmaking. https://unity3d.com/sff/18

https://issuu.com/unity-3d/docs/unity-sff18-real-time

What it really means is for the films with heavy computer graphic and animated characters to allow the director to see the actual setting and the motion captured character to come alive on the screen when footage is captured.

The director is able to see how's the virtual setting is rendered with lighting and atmosphere, and how the animated CG character acts in the virtual scene when a real actor's motion and emotion is motion-captured to translate to the CG character. This allows the film to be created in a completely digital environment. Because all elements of the image is generated in the computer and the digital studio. In previous generation of filmmaking, the CG environment has to be created and rendered by digital artist and a waiting process was needed for the image to take shape. Now with the use of game engine, all the virtual environment, lighting, camera movement and position, atmosphere, physical properties of objects, special effects, character movement, facial expression, weather conditions, sound effects and ambience can be generated in the computer in real time. It is because the gamer demands a realistic immersive environment to be able to engage fully into the game world, the game engine has to provide real time feedback of a total scenario for the game to work, the virtual world of the game engine is in fact a ready-to-film cinematic world.

With this set up I can imagine even with live actors, the principles work the same, they can act in front of the camera with a setting that is already generated by the game engine and the director can see the finished picture right through the computer screen, without having to wait for the CGI artist to compose and render the final image in post-production. This production environment is similar to the present CG movies where actors are required to use their imagination when acting in front of a green or blue screen where the virtual environment is inserted later on.