Virtual Production – Natalia Torres talks about how we will produce in the future
Natalia Torres was one of the lecturers at this year’s Unreal Day, the second event of its kind organized by the SGA, 3Lateral and Epic Games, where the Unreal Engine community from the region gathers to share knowledge and experience through a program that includes workshops, masterclasses, portfolio review, keynote and showcase lectures. She taught a masterclass called Lighting: Giving Life to an Environment.
Having missed the Unreal Fest this year, she was super happy to visit Serbia for the first time and prove how Unreal Day is growing strong, becoming a key meeting point for UE users not just in the region but also in Europe.
We used the first chance we got to sit down and chat with Natalia about virtual production and the Unreal Engine. Her abundant experience as the Virtual Production Lead at Magic Fennec and an Unreal Engine instructor at UT-HUB will surely make for a great read!
Natalia says that after long years of being a photographer, she found out that Unreal Engine allowed her to create new virtual worlds that she could portray, leading her to a whole new way of creating art, although, on a daily basis she finds herself immersed in virtual production projects working around the stage and teaching the ins and outs of the Engine.
Magic Fennec, where Natalia is the Virtual Production Lead, is a team of art and technology experts who complement each other to create 3D virtual realities in real time. Through Unreal Engine they diversify its applications in different industries improving society through first-class technological solutions.
Natalia is also an Unreal Authorized Instructor at UT-HUB, the official Spanish Unreal Engine training center. The hub was created to respond to the need for companies to find highly qualified professionals in the Unreal Engine. They want to boost the employment of their students by accompanying them throughout their future employment in a sector that is driving the digital economy.
SGA: What is virtual production and how does it differ from traditional filmmaking techniques?
Natalia: I like to say that virtual production is when the physical world meets the virtual world in any kind of media or filmmaking. It’s not just the LED volume as we’ve seen in the Mandalorian, but when we work with a motion capture suit as well. It differs from traditional filmmaking techniques because it changes the pipeline a little bit. When using virtual production as a tool, you change the way you’re producing. Rather than having everything done in post-production, the ideal thing now would be to have everything done in pre-production so you can be prepared. Normally you just filmed and then you went to post-production and made all the changes afterward. With virtual production, we aim to lower post-production time. It is a big change because you need to have everything really clear beforehand. This is a bit tricky because it can be complicated for people who are very creative to understand that.
SGA: What makes the Unreal Engine a popular choice for this technology?
Natalia: real time! That’s it! It helps not just with the production but with creativity as well. It’s another way of making things work. It is creativity itself. We would all like to create something that comes from our minds. So having that done in real time and being able to make changes in real time – not just on the computer but even on the stage – that’s priceless.
SGA: In which ways does real time rendering in the Unreal Engine impact the overall cost and efficiency of production?
Natalia: By using the Unreal Engine in filming you can shoot five different scenarios in just one day. You can shoot the same moment of the day as many times as you want. You don’t need to wait for the golden hour to happen and have only ten minutes to capture it. You can have it all day long if you want to. So, obviously, it’s a quicker way of shooting and that makes the cost of production go down. Also, you don’t need to travel. It is so realistic that it looks like you are actually where you need to be. Traveling with the whole crew to different places costs money and time. And time is money in production.
SGA: What is the potential impact of virtual production on the future of the entertainment industry in your opinion?
Natalia: For filmmaking, it changes the way things have been working. I think that in the near future films will have half-half normal production and virtual production. And I think that it’s going to make everything easier for the video game industry, too, especially for mockup artists – e. g. it can help them understand how human beings behave and the way they move. At the moment, virtual production is mainly used for entertainment, but it can be used at events, exhibitions, television, or for anything really visual.
SGA: Would you say you are one of the few female instructors for the Unreal Engine? Do you think there are fewer women in this field than men?
Natalia: When I first started to teach, we were not that many. There were a lot of artists who were female. And now I’m really happy because on the last Fellowships that I was teaching and mentoring, a lot of other female colleagues joined the boat so there were half-half men and women teachers. So, we’re getting there!
SGA: What are the greatest challenges when it comes to teaching people to use the Unreal Engine?
Natalia: One of the greatest challenges for me is when someone comes from another 3D software. If you’re completely new to the Unreal Engine, I think it’s easier. There are a lot of things that you need to learn and it takes time but as it is something so visual, what you see is what you get. It’s not that complicated to understand. But if you come from another software, it’s more complicated. I’m getting a lot of students that come from Maya or from Cinema 4D. The other day I was teaching Sequencer at UT-HUB and there were a lot of Cinema 4D users. When I showed them how to use Sequencer, they didn’t understand how things were happening at the same time. They didn’t get the way it was working, it was really complicated for them. And for Maya users, it’s kind of the same. They don’t understand the structure of Unreal. But they always get there eventually. It’s just hard to forget about whatever you’ve been dealing with until now. And you should because Unreal Engine is going to be the last software you’ll use!
SGA: Lastly, what is the Spanish Unreal Engine ecosystem like? Are there any interesting projects being developed?
Natalia: Now in Spain, we are getting more into virtual production projects. For example, we’ve been working with Netflix, HBO and Amazon Prime. That’s really cool because you get to work with people who do amazing stuff. There are also a lot of VR projects. There was a really cool project that was developed for the National Television, called Mapi. It was real time AR on television, which was really big and amazing. There has also been a lot of 3D scanning. Architectural visualization is a big thing with Unreal Engine in Spain, too. And I’m pretty sure that there are a lot of things that I don’t know about happening. It’s not really my background, so I’m not really able to talk about UE in gaming. I know for certain that there are a few studios in Barcelona and Madrid that do full Unreal Engine video games. I’m pretty sure there are a lot of people working with it. Slowly we’re getting more and more people interested in the Unreal Engine for sure!
