If you’re anything of a film-gear head or even just have a passing understanding of VFX—bluescreen, greenscreen, etc.—you probably have a basic understanding of the Volume. The use of the Volume is pretty prevalent these days, and it’s used a lot, but it first came to light to the public and those who write about movies with the ”Star Wars” series, “The Mandalorian” because the Lucasfilm series was basically the first production to use it. What is it?
Known as StageCraft, its original name—The Volume is the colloquial name that became more popular among filmmakers—StageCraft is an immersive on-set virtual production visual effects technology composed of a LED video wall designed by Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) and again, was initially developed for the Disney+ series “The Mandalorian.”
Why? All kinds of reasons, but the two key ones might be budgets and lighting control (which also makes things cost-effective). Why fly off to the deserts of Abu Dhabi when you can create that environment and landscape photo-realistically in the Volume? Or, you may have a long ten-page scene that only takes place over five minutes, but it could take all day to shoot and if you’re shooting outdoors and or anywhere where outdoor light is seeping into the indoor environment, this is a way to control the consistency of the light and not have to battle the changing daylight all day long.
So, developed for “The Mandalorian,” and who was the director of photography on the premiere episode of the series that set the tone, mood, vibe and aesthetic of the series created by Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni? None other than superstar Australian director of photography Greig Fraser. Nominated twice for the Oscars (2017’s “Lion” the first time), Fraser won his first Academy Award for his cinematography on Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” in 2022.
He’s quickly shot up as one of the best DP’s in the world and has shot films like “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012), “Rogue One” (2016), “Vice” (2018), “Dune” (2021), and “The Batman” (2022) to name just a few.
Fraser was on a recent episode of Oscar-winning cinematographer Roger Deakins’ TeamDeakins podcast, which we frequently cover because it’s excellent, and the Aussie DP explained how his early work on “The Mandalorian” circa 2019 and even in the prep way before it, was vital to his work on Matt Reeves’ ‘Batman’ in 2022.
Fraser had worked with Reeves on “Let Me In” in 2010, and it was always their intention to work together again, but busy schedules prevented the DP from working with the director again. But in short, Fraser’s early look at the Volume, years before it was officially in use, was something he tipped Reeves about, encouraging him to think about it as a tool to use on the Batman (and as the video below shows, the use of the Volume on “The Batman” was intensive, and also in a lot of scenes you would never imagine were created in the Volume).
To hear it more technically from Team Deakins, “Greig reveals the early conversations he had with Reeves about the potential applications of the Volume lighting system and how the interactivity of their intended lighting design precluded the use of bluescreen.”
And as you may have heard by now, Roger Deakins is a huge fan of “The Batman,” thinks it’s the best-lit superhero film in ages and was appalled that it wasn’t nominated for an Oscar (thoughts of which he echoes in this podcast too).
“One of the biggest challenges of the film was getting to the point where we could shoot on The Volume,” Fraser explained in the podcast. “I was working with and developing the technology with ILM around 2017 and 2018 before ‘Mandalorian.’ We used a version of it on ‘Rogue One,’ in 2015.”
Fraser said that he then worked with ILM after that and suggested, ‘if we did this and did that, this would be the way you would shoot something for real, this would be how you would do a virtual stage.”
So, as this was being developed and getting ready, and Fraser was already working with Reeves very early on in the script stage, he tipped Reeves to its development and how they could use it on “The Batman.”
“As we were doing tests on ‘The Mandalorian,’ I said to Matt, ‘dude, there is something coming down the pipe that we’ve got to consider or look at,’” he recalled. Fraser explained the technology behind The Volume, and its advantages and explained the “holy grail option for filmmakers” of “shooting over a consistent day, with consistent light—which normally doesn’t exist, be it dawn, dusk, night. Trying to be consistent with the quality of light is one of the hardest things I think we [filmmakers] do.”
Knowing what was going to be available to him, Fraser said Reeves “wrote scenes precisely for the Volume,” he said. “I explained to him that it uses big geometric shapes, building sites—so he wrote that into the script—and by the time we shot it, ILM’s technology had improved where we could do really high-rez cityscapes and high-rez buildings, so we had kind of designed it for that purpose, and that’s how it was written.”
Fraser explained that during the production process, producers were trying to bring down the budget as they normally do; cities, cityscapes, and locations were the “target,” and the DP insisted it couldn’t be done on bluescreen and had to be done on the Volume. Thus, you get the incredible look of “The Batman.”
And while many pundits and critics point to “Ant-Man: Quantumania” as an example of a big-budget movie that uses The Volume and looks bland and generic (hard to argue, tbh), hell, look at “The Batman” as an example of a movie not shot on film (yes, digital), that looks gorgeous and uses the Volume to great artistic effect. Listen to the whole podcast below and definitely check out the Behind The Scenes Of The Batman (LED Volume video) too.