Star Trek: Discovery / Strange New Worlds — virtual production at scale

Two concurrent series, each with its own visual identity, both requiring large-scale environments on episodic dates. Pushing every environment into post is slow, expensive and takes the world away from the actors and the cinematographer on the day.

As Zimmerman has put it, the work is always story-driven, and each show also has its own identity and its own set of sensibilities visually — so scale alone was never the goal.

A large LED volume was brought into the production plan as one tool among several. American Cinematographer's coverage of Strange New Worlds documents a 70ft by 30ft horseshoe-shaped volume, using ROE Visual Black Pearl BP2 2.8mm panels for the walls and Carbon CB5 5.77mm panels for the ceiling, fed by Brompton Tessera SX40 processors outputting real-time content from Unreal Engine, with OptiTrack cameras handling multi-camera tracking. The same volume was used for Discovery's LED-wall work.

Environments were treated as production design rather than as backdrops. Cinematographer Magdalena Górka, ASC, PSC has described lighting with the wall — designing the lighting directly into the screen content as a starting point — and credits production designer Jonathan Lee and Pixomondo for the environment designs.

Environment development moved earlier. Virtual art department work, previs and asset building had to be finished to a shootable standard before the stage day, not after it, because the content is both the background and part of the lighting.

The decision to use the volume was made scene by scene, weighed against page count and screen time, with the wall used both as a large fixed backing and as a live, tracked environment — and greenscreen still used where it was the better answer.

Assets were built at genuine scale where the story required it. Zimmerman has described Discovery's Breen ship as the largest asset the team had built — around ten kilometres of digital environment — and has described sending a survey team to a desert in north-eastern Brazil to build a sequence environment before it was lit and photographed on the volume.

None of this removed departments. It reordered them: design, cinematography, VFX and the virtual art department made their decisions together, further upstream than a conventional post-heavy schedule allows.

Virtual production is a filmmaking tool, not a replacement for locations, sets, designers, cinematographers or artists. It earns its place when it puts more of the picture in front of the people making it.

The discipline that matters is knowing when not to use it — and having that judgement inside the production, held by the people who also carry the shots that do not go on the wall.