With the advance of so-called ‘virtual productions’, the film industry is changing. Large LED screens make it possible to virtually project film sets into the studio. This could potentially minimize production costs while making film productions more sustainable as well. Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg has been researching 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 that utilize virtual production technology and will make new processes possible; especially in the field of animation. In this context, since fall 2022, the Filmakademie has been working on two ambitious EU projects: EMIL and MAX-R. Both projects deal with Extended Reality (XR), the collective term for Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality, which includes the field of Virtual Production.

EMIL, the European Media and Immersion Lab, is a joint project involving Aalto University (Finland), the University of Bath (United Kingdom), the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain) and the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. The goal is to create a combination of physical and virtual laboratories that supports the innovation and development of XR content, services and applications. The project will also foster individual XR Lighthouse projects created for each of the EMIL core areas. Furthermore, the project strives to liase directly with the creative industry community. Two open calls for industry professionals have been conducted, supporting individual projects with funds ranging from 250.000 € to 500.000 €. The overall budget for third-party project funding is 5,6 Mio €. Third-party projects gain access to lab capacities and expert advice. Among other exciting projects from Europe, the Ludwigsburg-based company Pixelcloud has also been granted funding for its project ‘E.V.I.L. – Climate Change VR’.

The MAX-R (Mixed Augmented and eXtended Reality media pipeline) project will define, develop, and demonstrate a complete pipeline of tools and programs for the creation, processing and delivery of the highest quality Extended Reality content. MAX-R is designed to be based on open application programming interfaces (open APIs) as well as open file and data transfer formats. This is intended to facilitate continuous development of the pipeline and the easy 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.