HOLLYWOOD — Inside a converted warehouse off a Hollywood side street, a curved wall of video panels stands two stories high, and when the operator brings it up, a stretch of desert highway appears where the concrete used to be. The panels are the pitch. The question is whether anyone is buying.
The space is a “volume” stage — the industry’s term for a set ringed and roofed with high-resolution LED screens that display a moving background, so that a scene supposedly set on a desert road can be shot indoors with the road behind the actors rather than added later. The technology is not new, but building one is expensive, and the company that has spent the past year outfitting this warehouse is opening its doors at an inhospitable moment, with production budgets tight and stages across town sitting dark.
The people behind it say that is exactly the bet. A volume stage, they argue, can save a production the cost and logistics of traveling a crew to a real location, and in a lean year the productions that do go forward are hunting for precisely that kind of saving.
“We are not pretending the market is booming. It isn’t,” said Callum Ferreira-Nunes, one of the partners, standing where the concrete floor met the base of the screens. “But when money is tight, the argument for shooting the desert on this wall instead of trucking forty people to the actual desert gets easier to make, not harder. We built for the downturn, not against it.”
Not everyone in the building is sanguine. The technology demands its own specialists — the artists who build the virtual environments, the technicians who keep the panels calibrated and the camera’s motion synced to the image — and some of the traditional crafts worry about what a wall of screens does to their work. A veteran set builder who consulted on the space said he had watched with mixed feelings, aware that a background rendered on a screen is a background he does not construct.
The stage’s operators counter that virtual production does not erase the crew so much as rearrange it, trading some crafts for others and keeping the work, at least, in a Los Angeles building rather than on a plane to another state. Whether the market agrees will show up in the bookings, and it is too early to say. The company reported interest from commercial and streaming projects and declined to name any that had signed.
For now the warehouse runs demonstrations, walking prospective clients along the base of the screens while the desert highway scrolls past behind them. It is a striking thing to stand inside, a room that can become somewhere else at the push of a fader. Whether striking translates into a booked calendar is the wager the partners have made, in a year that has punished optimism, on a technology they are betting the slump itself will sell.