With the advance of so-called „virtual productions,“ the film world is changing. Big walls of LED screens make it possible to project film sets virtually into the studio. This could minimize production costs while making them more sustainable as well. Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg has been rese – arching virtual production methods and the use of modern display technologies in the film and media industry for many years. Artificial intelligence is expected to be of great relevance in future production workflows using this technology and will make new processes possible; especially in the field of animation.

In this context, two dedicated EU projects will start at Filmakademie in fall 2022: EMIL and MAX-R. Both deal with Extended Reality (XR), the collective term for Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality, which also includes Virtual Production.

EMIL, the European Media and Immersion Lab is a physical and virtual lab operation of Aalto University (Finland), University of Bath (United Kingdom), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain), and Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. Here, XR “lighthouse” projects are initiated and third-party funded projects are subsidized with a total of 5.6 million EUR. Third-party funded projects will receive access to Lab capacities and expert advice. The call for applications will be published at the end of 2022.

The MAX-R (Mixed Augmented and eXtended Reality media pipeline) project will define, develop, and demonstrate a complete set of tools to create, process, and deliver the highest quality Extended Reality content in real time. The project will be based on application programming interfaces (APIs) and open file and data transfer formats. This will encourage the development and support the integration of new (open source) tools. The consortium consists of Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Brainstorm Multimedia (Spain), Foundry (Ireland), Disguise, Improbable, BBC (United Kingdom), CREW, University of Hasselt (Belgium), ARRI, Film Light, and Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg.