In 2021, I was LED / Additional Supervisor on ‘The Marvels’ for Marvel Studios. Responsible for managing the creative and technical aspects of the virtual production elements of the shoot. Working with the production VFX Supervisor, Tara Demarco and Producer, James Alexander, to create LED content to support the studio, director, and show narrative direction. Pre-shoot during prep, I communicated the director’s intent to the VFX vendor, managed iterations, and reviewed content with the VFX supervisor and director. During this period, I constantly communicated with the VFX producer to ensure the content and technical challenges were on track with the prescribed milestones and dealt with, ready for when needed by production. I was also responsible for planning and facilitating on-set reviews and liaising with all other production HODs to integrate the VFX / virtual production workflow/assets into the production.

During the shoot, I was the conduit between the director, VFX supervisor, DOP, HODs and virtual production team - ensuring smooth running and providing front-line problem-solving.

As well as my virtual production responsibilities - I provided additional VFX supervision support to our VFX supervisors, supervising the 2nd unit, overseeing element and sprite plate shoots, briefing and managing previs and postvis.

Carol’s Ship

The cockpit of Carol’s ship was mounted on a 32-ton rated 3-axis hydraulic gimble for practical movement inside a custom pop-up LED volume.

3800 AOTO LED panels were hung in a 142 linear ft radiuses “U” shape surrounding the 88’ set.

With ILM, we created virtual art department jump points and environments around our ship during intergalactic travel and strategically placed DMP nebulas outside the windows for dialogue scenes.

We also filmed with a multi-camera array in Tropea, Italy and projected stitched environment footage with added CG clouds outside of the cockpit.

Several scenes required interactive lighting from the volume but not final pixel imagery. For these, we animated flight paths in previz and then pre-rendered a lower-resolution environment for the actors to react to.

Saber in Distress

The near-earth base of activity for Nick Fury was based on the orbital height and flight path of the ISS. We created a 30 ft high by 60 linear ft radiuses volume around a glass-filled command centre.

Our virtual art department content comprised six pre-rendered 8k matte paintings of Earth with adjustable layers for planet brightness and clouds in the day and city lights and the aurora borealis at night.