How Is Steven Soderbergh Using LED Walls To Mimic Manhattan?

There are times when I'm watching movies and TV shows where the CGI and VFX are so obvious they take me out of the story. But the best use of this tech is when you really have no idea it is in play.

This is the case with Steven Soderbergh's new TV series, Full Circle, on Max. It's the first series ever to use Rosco’s RDX Lab System for interactive digital backgrounds on an LED wall.

They use it to mimic Manhattan outside apartment windows, mostly to make the environment feel real without paying the extensive price to shoot in Manhattan.

In this instance, RDX, a software developed by FuseFX, enabled director Soderbergh and gaffer Derek Gross to use an iPad to project and modify a high-resolution backdrop in real-time. You can change the way things look, the time of day, and add little nuances to the image. These images were displayed on an enormous LED screen measuring 180 feet in width and 20 feet in height, placed behind the apartment windows within a soundstage.

They originally wanted to shoot this series in a real apartment, but that was never an option because the other tenants in the building would never let them be there for almost a month.

Soderbergh was bummed about that, then told IndieWire, “But I love what you get from [RDX] and the ability to go from one look to another in a matter of seconds. Literally, I can move the image around, I can adjust the contrast, I can adjust the brightness, I can blow things up, I can shrink them. There’s no other way to get this interactive, refractive light bouncing around the room off the surfaces with that kind of technology.”

So how does this all work?

Well, you need images to broadcast on the LED wall outside the fake apartment windows. so they actually sent a guy to Washington Square Park to take hundreds of photos with a Fuji 100 GFX camera.

From there, those shots are loaded into the program and positioned in a way that feels natural outside the windows. then from an iPad, they can change what they want the view to look like.

This represents cutting edge tech that's there to just blend in and be easy for the filmmaker to use. And that's why I think it will last.

Source: IndieWire