Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1277960
24 PRODUCTION SOUND & VIDEO – Summer 2020 The largest and most sophisticated virtual filmmaking environment of its kind; I'll always remember that first day stepping into The Volume. With its twenty-feet-high LED screens wrapping two hundred seventy degrees around with two 18x20-foot-wide panels behind the camera that moved in and out of position, creating an almost perfect circle with about a seventy-five-foot-diameter performance space in the middle —topped off with a LED video ceiling. This technology and the way it was being used allowed the filmmakers to have real-time, photo-realistic effects captured in- camera. It gave us pixel-accurate 3D virtual sets, using powerful gaming and motion-capture technology. The background content would move along with the camera to allow for perfect camera perspective. This was all done with tracking balls on the camera and infrared cameras around the set. The images that were projected on the LED screens were amazing. A beautiful sunset could be kept at magic hour all day! Maybe a few more clouds passing overhead to reflect in The Mandalorian's helmet? Just load in a different sky passing over in the LED ceiling. The Volume was indeed something to see in action, but with all the advantages, came an array of unique sound challenges that we had to address. There was a dot on the floor at the dead-center point of The Volume. In our first On the set of The Mandalorian, season one. Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon/Lucasfilm Ltd. meeting during prep, I walked out to this spot with one of our producers, and we started having a conversation to experience the effect that The Volume produced. Speaking to each other at a reasonably low volume, I could hear my voice, amplified, coming from behind me! It was then that I knew I was going to need some help. I called in a specialist, an acoustical engineer, Hanson Hsu, with Delta H Design. From the center point of the space, he calculated our voices would reflect every two and a half inches around the entire perimeter of the wall at one hundred percent with no decay. Hanson explained that the best solution to allow us to capture usable dialog in this space would be to somehow change the pitch of the LED wall by just a few inches. Of course, changing the wall's pitch, the angle of the LED screens, would not be possible. Why? In changing the pitch of the screens, you render the desired effect of the LED's useless. Working with Hanson, we were able to come up with what we hoped would be a workable solution. He had developed a technology—ZR Acoustics. For our application, ZR Acoustics are screens or devices as Hanson refers to them, measuring four by eight feet, and about an inch and a half thick, weighing just over twenty-five pounds that we hung on rolling stands, vertically. The screens don't absorb sound or deflect it, rather they take the air that sound travels in