The latest project for director-DP Steven Soderbergh is the MAX crime miniseries Full Circle, starring Zazie Beetz, Timothy Olyphant, Claire Danes, and Dennis Quaid.
Many scenes of the series are interior shots that take place in the Browne family home. While Soderbergh initially hoped to shoot these scenes on location in an apartment near New York’s Washington Square Park, various factors led to the production opting to shoot inside a sound stage instead.
Soderbergh’s gaffer Derek Gross suggested to Soderbergh that the production try out the Rosco Digital Experience Live Action Backdrop (RDX) for these scenes after seeing an RDX System prototype at Cine Gear Expo 2022. Utilising software by FuseFX, the System is designed to work with Rosco’s extensive digital content library. The technology makes the background imagery Rosco has created over the past three decades available for virtual productions shooting in an LED volume. It also lowers the barrier to entry by significantly reducing the time and cost typically needed to build environments in pre-production.
The show required digital backdrop images to be displayed on a 180-foot flat LED provided by 4Wall that required a purpose-built system that would be able to support a virtual set of this magnitude. With a limited amount of time before production began, the virtual production facility Carstage and video display specialists at Visual Alchemy teamed up with Rosco and FuseFX to create a workflow that would allow the RDX System to run smoothly through Unreal Engine to display and scale high-resolution images onto the extensive LED screen that was made up of around 1,000 tiles.
When speaking about the creative possibilities the RDX System afforded the production, Soderbergh added, “I can treat the stage like a practical location. In essence, it becomes invisible to me and that’s exactly what you’re looking for. That’s a real indicator of how great this technology is. It literally fools you. At a certain point in time, you just feel like you’re in a real space and you’ve stopped thinking about it. As a filmmaker that’s the goal, for it to become integrated in an organic way to your approach.”
The technology was so realistic that Soderbergh shared how the RDX System did, in fact, fool many members of the crew. “It was always funny to be working on the set, which was built to work as a real apartment with hallways and elevators, and you’re in there for five or six hours working on a scene in which you’ve set the iPad to 3:30pm in the afternoon. Then you’re done with that, and you switch immediately to another mode, and you watch everybody’s head spin because psychologically they’ve gotten into a space where they thought we were in an apartment at 3:30pm in the afternoon. It’s interesting psychologically and it made me laugh to watch people’s reactions when they realise that oh yeah, we’re on a stage.”
