Negotiating the coming together of live-action and animation: Virtual production and the creative process of the short film A Future Vision of Trauma Care

The 5-minute short film A Future Vision of Trauma Care is the outcome of a research project funded by the Jamieson Trauma Institute, Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital. The research team were approached by the JTI to produce a short film that created a futuristic vision of what trauma care may look like in 2030. The practice-led research at the core of this project was inspired by the virtual production (VP) process adopted by the large budget television series The Mandalorian (2019), using LED (Light Emitting Diode) screens and volumes to generate virtual sets that allow for the replacement of physical sets, characters and objects with digital substitutes. Behind the scenes footage from The Mandalorian (2019) propagated an overly sanguine view of VP’s potential and it shaped widely held beliefs that filmmakers from one-person teams and low-budget independent filmmakers to large scale productions can easily adopt VP. This led to a view in the field of film practice that VP will soon replace traditional live-action film production and the approach is easily implemented by practitioners without large budgets and funding for technical support. A research team from Film, Screen, Animation, at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) – comprised of screen practitioners and researchers – set out to produce a short film to examine the workflow and efficacy of low-budget VP. In particular, the research examined the implications of a VP workflow for the live-action and animation directors collaborating on set.