Virtual Production

Here is how this works in practice. We deliver virtual production as an integrated pipeline — real-time render engines, LED volumes, camera tracking, and the tech crew to keep it all in sync so digital environments appear correctly in camera as the camera moves. The way has a specific value in Iceland: a production can capture real Icelandic landscape plates and scan data on location. Vatnajökull glacier ice, lava fields, the aurora over Þingvellir — and bring them into the volume, giving cast and crew a controlled, weather-proof stage while keeping the country's genuine look.

Here is the short of it. Our crews handle the on-location plate photography and scanning to virtual-production standard, the real-time content build, the volume calibration, and the on-set integration of tracking and lighting. The volume also removes the country's cold and fast-changing weather as a production risk for sequences that would otherwise be exposed. We run virtual production on Reykjavík stages and set up the pipeline from start to finish, staffing from the skilled the capital crew base and bringing in volume hardware and virtual-production pros from the UK and mainland Europe.

Here is the breakdown. Iceland's relationship with virtual production is shaped by its identity as a location-filming country. A subarctic island on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, it is sought out for its real glaciers, volcanoes and geothermal landscapes — the settings behind shoots from 'Game of Thrones' to Nolan's 'Interstellar' — so the virtual-production volume here is most powerful as a way to bring those real landscapes into a controlled stage rather than to fabricate them. Reykjavík, the world's northernmost capital, anchors the studio base, with the RVK Studios tricky in Gufunes the principal site.

Here is what that looks like on the ground. The country runs on close to 100 per cent renewable electricity from geothermal and hydroelectric power. This cleanly supplies the heavy power draw of a volume. English is near-universally spoken and ATA carnets cover short-term gear import. Eligible spend on Icelandic crew, stage and plate photography can count toward the reimbursement of 25 per cent, rising to 35 per cent for qualifying larger projects and TV series meeting spend and length criteria, administered by Film in the country.