Studio Ulster shows the state-of-the-art in virtual production

The new Studio Ulster virtual production facilities on the shores of Belfast Lough in Northern Ireland are a $100 million, 75,000 square foot world class campus planted slap bang on the leading edge of the technology.

Northern Ireland is one of those countries that punches severely above its weight when it comes to movies and television. I know this because I live in Holywood just outside Belfast (yes, with one l, thank you spell checkers everywhere). And it's not just the place name that breeds a sense of industry familiarity either. There's a picture of a visiting George Lucas up on the wall of a local restaurant, a local pub has one of Peter Dinklage sitting at the bar from his time shooting Game of Thrones here, there's Jamie Dornan right over there, and nearby pizzeria Flout.Pizza got involved with teaching the cast of How to Train Your Dragon to make pizza. "Arguably the best pizza in the world," says Nick Frost, and he's not wrong.

So, the launch of a world-leading virtual production facility down the road (technically across the Lough) rather than, say, somewhere along the outer reaches of London's orbital M25 motorway is hardly a surprise. But what is impressive is just how much Studio Ulster raises the game.

At 12,750 square feet, Studio Ulster's VP Stage 1 isn't the largest LED volume in the world, that record is held by the giant 15,000 square foot NantStudios facility at Docklands Studios in Melbourne, Australia, but it has a fair claim to being the most sophisticated. Built around a NantStudios-certified Dynamic Volume system, it features nine configurable walls and five motorised ceiling pods, allowing productions to shape and reshape the volume with ease and at a speed that can't be found elsewhere.

"We’re modular in a way that nowhere else in the world is right now, ” Studio Ulster CEO, Declan Keeney, told Deadline. "For example, if you need a long train or a long boat scene on the North Atlantic and then you need to pivot quickly and do a balcony scene in Cairo, we can change our stages using a dynamic volume system within half a day to one day into a new set up."

That makes an already flexible technology even more so. Meanwhile, VP Stage 2 is 4600 square feet and features a curved LED wall with a ROE 2.2 pixel pitch and an LED ceiling. The size makes it ideal for shooting in-car scenes and other moderate scale virtual productions.

Then there's VP Stage 3. This is led by Ulster University and is dedicated to VP R&D. It's one of five CoSTAR network labs (Convergent Screen Technologies and performance in Realtime) sited across the UK, including facilities at Pinewood Studios, bringing together world leaders across academia and industry to investigate new methods of visual storytelling.

It's also available for commercial use and is built with the same pixel pitch as the other stages so that products can easily match visuals shot on any of them. It's also the only stage with an LED ceiling and an LED floor.

There's also a dedicated 2240 square foot Motion Capture Stage which, at 55 feet (16.76 metres) to the steel mounting points for lights or hoists, is the tallest in Europe. It also features a specialist overhead truss system for stunt rigging so productions can take full advantage of all that vertical space.

It all adds up to a hugely impressive set up. And given that the Titanic was built in the Belfast shipyards nearby ("It was fine when it left us," is the usual phrase used around now), it's not surprising that one of the first projects booked into the facility is a BBC series being shot under the working title Titanic Sinks Tonight by Stellify Media.

There's more too, with unspecified projects from major streamers and some UK and US independent features already booked in. Time for the local boozers, restaurants, and pizzerias to clear a bit more picture space on the walls...