Painting Practice is a Cardiff-based creative studio that bridges production and post-production across film, television and commercial projects. It has worked on big name productions including Black Mirror, His Dark Materials and the 2017 remake of Beauty and the Beast. Its new plugin, Plan V, lets users visualise virtually-created sets, scenes and worlds by using VR to provide a realistic sense of scale and fine detail.
Since founding the company 12 years ago, we’ve wanted to design sets and environments from start to finish, whether they’re made digitally or physically. On the digital side, it’s something that can include previsualisation, VFX, graphics, title sequences, atmosphere creation, green screen and more.
You can save a lot of time by getting the early stages right
We’ve realised in recent years that if you can bake in the visual effects beforehand, you don't have to do it twice afterwards. When we started working on His Dark Materials, this type of thinking really helped us get the project off the ground and figure out what the final environments were going to be. Through season one, we went through quite a steep learning curve about what was useful, why we were using technologies and tools like Unreal, what was beneficial to the show and how much so.
I wanted to research and develop an app, but was wary of how it’d affect production
With anything new in terms of R&D and technical, you don't really want to financially burden the production. Some of the R&D pays off and some of it doesn't, so it’s often a bit grey as to what you get out of it.
When we found out about the Clwstwr funding, I felt confident it’d help us to push forward with developing our technology and our creative process without burdening the projects.
Another concern I had was around the ownership
It's important for us not to lose any IP, so we're very careful when selecting the type of funding we go for. It makes sense for someone who's funding something to want something out of it, whether it be IP or financial gains. When we spoke to Clwstwr, they were very understanding about us wanting to keep the property of the final products, and we were very happy for the products to be used in academia. We were looking for someone to support us in the project, but to also leave us freedom to be able to continue the work as we saw fit.
The core idea of the app came about because of modernisation
We had a bunch of processes that we were doing in Unreal Engine, a free programme, to do with virtual cameras. We'd spent a lot of time making camera rigs and 3D printing devices to allow directors to hold up a monitor with attachments, which would allow the user to be in the studio at the same time as being in a virtual environment. The technology used the Oculus or Vive, cheating it into thinking it was a camera. However, a lot of this became redundant when Unreal made a plugin that allows you to attach an iPad to the game engine.
So, we wanted to figure out a way for all this work that we'd done and the processes we'd developed could still be used. At the time, Unreal were buying a lot of companies up and then making their resources available to small studios and artists for free, which was doing a lot for the creative community. I thought that if we could get the funding, we could do the same; rather than try to benefit from the app by charging for it, we thought that the app being free would generate more work for us, help us create work and bring about employment opportunities.
Once Clwstwr funding kicked in, we got to work on the app, which we named Plan V
We had coders going at full speed and a programmer working full-time to build and troubleshoot the app. As we ran into problems, we changed tack a little bit. Initially we wanted to get an app out that worked on the iPad through the Mac, but the amount of things we’d have to do to make it Mac-specific were too painful. We also decided that it’d be better to build Plan V as a plugin.
Timing meant that we had to revert to building the plugin for desktop PCs
Everyone on His Dark Materials would walk around with iPads, so we thought that people would use Plan V more if it was iPad-friendly. It would mean people on set could play around with an iPad to look at set designs, camera angles and things like that. But, because we actually wanted to deliver something by the end of the grant window, I wanted to make sure that we had a viable entity. So, we shifted our focus back to PC to make a desktop version of Plan V, so that you can use it with the iPad in conjunction with a PC if you're running the main software for the desktop. We do have a Mac build in progress, which we’ll probably release in time, but it’s not stable enough yet.
Plan V launched with a really successful first fortnight
In just two weeks, we'd reached 26,000 visits to the webpage for Plan V, 4,500 downloads of the plugin and an average of 120 users in a given day. It was the type of results we'd hoped for, probably even better than what we expected. The COVID-19 lockdown has affected the uptake a little since; even though it's designed to be used remotely, many of the projects that we might've been using Plan V for have stalled until we can shoot again. When we come out of lockdown or things pick up again in the industry, we'll be able to revisit the promotion of it and re-energise it again.
The big thing now is to find all the good things about being in lockdown
If we can find ways of working collaboratively albeit remotely, and if we can work more economically and environmentally-minded across multiple locations, then Plan V will become more relevant than ever. For this reason, I think we will try to push for funding to make a multiplayer workflow. It’d mean many users in remote locations could be in Plan V at the same time, working on and sharing project files while being within a 3D space.