Disguise powered the on-set virtual production behind Daddio

Throughout its twenty-four-year history, Disguise’s Emmy-Award-winning technology has been behind some of the most immersive visuals in films, episodics and more. For new feature film Daddio, Disguise’s virtual production workflow helped producer, writer and director Christy Hall captivate audiences for 101 minutes with only two characters.

Starring Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn and featured as an official selection at Toronto and Tribeca Film Festival, Daddio tells the story of a young woman returning home to Manhattan after a trip. She grabs a cab from the airport, then unexpectedly ends up having life-changing conversations with the taxi’s driver, Clark. Originally conceived as a stage play, the script was included on the “Black List” of the most-liked unproduced scripts in Hollywood before being developed on an indie budget of only $10 million.

At first, Hall selected virtual production to capture the feature, as it would reduce the need to rig a moving cab or pay fees to shoot on-location. The technology also provided other benefits, including creating a safe, realistic set for actors to perform in. “I was excited to use the technology,” said Hall. “It created an immersive environment for the cast, so when Sean was driving, he kept almost being afraid he was going to hit things. And then Dakota looks out the window and cars are whizzing by. She could actually see the street and everything, so they’re engaging with a real sense of time and place.”

Simulating Travel

To capture the film, Hall worked together with 4Wall Entertainment’s VPs of Special Projects Ben Danielowski and Mathew Leland, VP Supervisor Julian Sarmiento and Disguise VP of Virtual Production Addy Ghani. First, the team mapped the taxi route Hall wanted Daddio’s characters to take on Google Street View. Next, they worked together with Plate Pros to capture the route in the real world. They captured two hours of 4K car process plates within only one night of shooting.

Once the route was captured, the team moved to production on 4Wall’s LED stage. Using Disguise’s GX 3 media servers, all the car process plates were reprojected and played back onto the LED volume. A real New York taxi cab was then cut in half so the team could put the camera in front of Johnson to capture her performance.

The Disguise Difference

“Using Disguise gave us the entire canvas,” said Leland. He explained that with Disguise, the team were able to easily twist and warp the flat car process plates into the correct perspective for the camera, as well as combine and play back multiple video plates in real time. “That means that although we have these individual screens, it’s all within one media server,” Leland added. “It allows us to map however we want, whether we want perspective, sizing, we can really kind of change what’s being reprojected onto those screens.”

“It would be impossible to make this feature with the budget we had without using virtual production,” says Hall.

After an international premiere at Toronto Film Festival, Daddio was picked up by Sony Pictures Classics and is now screening in select cinemas in the United States and Canada, and has been released on streaming platforms Now TV and Roku.