Virtual Production Program Boosts Alumni Success Stories
by Hugh Hart
For a new cohort of freshman Trojans arriving at USC this fall, their collegiate studies will include trips to Disneyland to study rock work, building mini-golf courses on campus, and dreaming up theme parks under the guidance of a legendary Disney Imagineer. All of this is in store for the inaugural class of Themed Entertainment majors, a brand new Bachelor of Fine Arts program offered by the School of Cinematic Arts. The incoming freshman will be joining students who transferred into the major last year during the program’s soft launch, arriving from such other areas of study as neuroscience, engineering, narrative studies, theater, and game design. Themed Entertainment is housed in the Interactive Media & Games Division and students are joining a cohort that includes Game Development and Design and Game Art.
The Themed Entertainment BFA was put together by Joe Garlington, a former Disney Imagineer with 40 years of experience in the industry. At Walt Disney Imagineering, Garlington was the creative lead for interactive projects, developing attractions for all Disney theme parks, leading the visioning for Disney’s Epcot theme park, and partnering with the Disney Research and Development team on new concepts and technologies. Outside of Disney, he worked with a number of zoos, aquariums, museums, and other science and technology centers.
Goodbye green screen, hello LED walls. That would appear to be one takeaway from Hollywood's enthusiasm for virtual production. Long a champion of cutting-edge imaging technologies, SCA expanded its embrace of digitally-generated environments last spring with the addition of the Sony Virtual Production studio. The soundstage features LED video panels that embed high-resolution imagery produced in Unreal Engine and other 3D creation tools. Unlike green screen sets, which require actors to imagine their surroundings, LED walls enable performers outfitted with motion capture sensors to react in the moment to vivid virtual environments. On the new soundstage, student directors can switch environments from urban skyscrapers to desert ranches with the swipe of a mouse. Cinematographers can pre-program camera moves while production designers alter sets with ease and lighting directors adjust each scene's tonal qualities with unprecedented nuance.
Disney+ series The Mandalorian is produced on virtual sets, building on technologies pioneered by such movies as The Polar Express, Avatar and The Lion King. At SCA, the Sony-funded soundstage serves as a professional-quality proving ground for students taking Film & Television Production classes from mo-cap specialist John Brennan, Student Academy Award-winning animator Emre Ökten and game designer Sean Bouchard.
Brennan '08 designs his courses to simulate real-world virtual production. "The LED wall kind of pitches itself because there's an aura and sensationalism around it," he says. "But the 446 class I teach deals with the grunt work and iterations of what virtual production actually is. If you land [a job] somewhere as a director or DP, this [virtual production] workflow can be kind of unsettling at first."
Caption: SCA students in pre-production for innovative LED wall/VR projects on the Akira Kurosawa Stage in the Robert Zemeckis Center.
Brennan should know. After graduating from SCA's Interactive Media & Game Division, he worked at Digital Domain, then earned a Visual Effects Society Award for his contributions to The Jungle Book, which pioneered the use of virtual space. "You learn to love it, and you realize that virtual production goes so much deeper than an LED wall," says Brennan, who more recently worked on The Lion King and Ready Player One. "Virtual production is about directing, blocking, and it's also about how to iterate repeatedly, how to go back and re-shoot. Executives can now focus-group $250 million VFX-driven movies with a lucid edit done in Unreal Engine that looks great. The downside is that creatives keep getting called back to adjust things or change the ending."
This tweaking-on-the-fly workflow shapes Brennan's approach. "Students pitch projects, we team up and move as fast as possible using AI mo-cap software or whatever to get to our "tech vis" storyboard edit. You want to be agile and quick so that we can watch this edit, knowing the fingers aren't going to move, it'll glitch–but do we care? If it's funny, if it's dramatic, if we react to bits the way you want us to, then for the rest of the semester we literally put our students through the same things that Jon Favreau or James Cameron or Barry Jenkins go through on their movies.”
Caption: SCA students on set using the new LED wall gifted by Sony located on the Akira Kurosawa Stage in the Robert Zemeckis Center.
Brennan's methodology has yielded rich benefits for numerous students. Sibi Naayagam, MFA '20, now works as a Virtual Production Lead on the 2024 Disney movie Mufasa: The Lion King for the Moving Picture Company. "Those SCA classes helped me find my voice as a filmmaker and gave me a medium through which I could present my stories," says Naayagam, who shifted focus from live-action to virtual production shortly after enrolling. "In my second semester, I remember walking past the motion capture stage during a break when Professor John Brennan came up to me and asked if I'd be interested in taking the class the following semester. That was the pivotal moment in my time at USC and for my career ever since."
Sam Leather, BFA '22, also joined MPC immediately upon graduation. "I got the job through my connection with Sibi, who I met in one of my directing classes," he explains. "I helped Sibi on his short film, we stayed in touch and when I graduated he recommended me to MPC."
Leather works as a technical director. "I build workflows and tools to better integrate Unreal Engine into a post-VFX pipeline,” says Leather. Elaborating on his responsibilities as a "Stage TD," Leather explains, "I built a toolset to transfer large crowd simulations from Houdini to Unreal Engine. I created a Houdini/PDG-based system for automating the ingest of VAD [Virtual Art Department] sets from Unreal Engine into a VFX asset management system."
Brennan's proteges also include Shaman Marya, MFA '22, who moved from New Delhi, India in 2019 to pursue his film studies. At SCA, he made a 3D animated short which won him an Epic Megagrant from Epic Games. He is also an Unreal Animation Fellow from the first Cohort in 2023. Marya, who recently completed VFX work on two major motion pictures, credits his success to virtual production lessons learned in the Film & Television Production department. "I came from a traditional live-action background but, at USC, classes and collaborators introduced me to this world of technology that was just waiting to be played around with."
Caption: SCA students film a Western-style scene with the new LED wall located on the Akira Kurosawa Stage in the Robert Zemeckis Center.
Marya cites many SCA faculty members as high-value mentors but notes that Brennan's course work proved especially impactful. "The Motion Capture classes I took with Professor Brennan reconfigured my entire understanding of filmmaking," Marya says. "It changed the way I think about pre-production, production, performance and post-production."
As VR, motion capture, "Extended Reality" XR software, 3D animation and game engine-generated imagery gain traction among mainstream movie-makers, interest in SCA's Virtual Production program has spread throughout campus, according to Brennan. "This semester, I have people from Critical Studies. I have Interactive. I have Animation, Production, people from the Iovine and Young Academy, people from Roski, from Viterbi’s Computer Science Department. Virtual production offers great opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration. I believe what we're doing here at SCA is a model for what classes like this can and should be."