Epic Games Partnered with Media.Monks to Showcase the Use of Unreal Engine 5 in the First Virtual Production Open House in India

Media.Monks India recently held a first of its kind event in Noida on March 16, 2023, India. The organization partnered up with Epic Games, the maker of Unreal Engine and ARK Solutions NCAM to conduct the first Virtual Production Open House in the country. During the full-day event, it invited filmmakers, producers, designers and more to help demonstrate and explain the potential of virtual production.

For those who don’t know, virtual production consists of merging live-action footage with CGI footage in-real time. This ends up providing the filmmakers with much more creative control and freedom when developing these films. It is also a smart choice to reduce the cost and time incurred during post-production of a movie, TV show, advertisement, and more.

Media.Monks showed audiences its take on things as well as the experience it has gained over the years. To ensure everyone understood the magic behind virtual production, the presenters highlighted and explained the virtual and physical assets on the scenes along with live demonstrations from recent films and more.

Epic Games and Media.Monks Virtual Production Open House details

The full-day event kicked off with an Introduction to the Fundamentals of Virtual Production talk, held by Robbie, John and Amit Naik from the Unreal Engine team. Then the attendees were briefed about Volume and how virtual production workflow looks like. Media.Monks also explained the creative approach behind virtual production to the audience. Then came the time for hands-on production demos with directors and DOPs. They showed different situations and possibilities that can be created with the help of a virtual stage and the volume.

After that, Chaitanya Chinchilkar, a guest speaker from Whistling Woods International, provided industry insights around the use of virtual production. He also shared that Whistling Woods International was teaching virtual production tools to its students.

Furthermore, Gayatri Sethi, SVP Growth came on to explain the time, place, and reason of using virtual production. Sethi also outlined how it can be cost-efficient for businesses across the country. Finally, the event concluded with an extremely brief Q&A session. More than 100 filmmakers from major production houses and independent filmmakers from Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi, Chennai, and Hyderabad attended the event.

Here’s what Media.Monks’ CCO- Art & Tech, John Paite stated after the event’s conclusions:

“We’re very excited by the overwhelming support and interest shown by some of the most celebrated and established filmmakers in the country. The film industry is highly competitive so it was an extremely refreshing and unique experience to be able to interact and work together on something that has the potential to change our industry for the better.”

Check out what Robert Godinho, MD at Media.Monks had to share about this event:

The event was well accepted and we saw a lot of potential collaborations and learning emerge from it. In line with the Media.Monks vision we intend to do more such open houses across the country, sharing our learnings on Art-Tech developments and of course learning a lot on the way from industry specialists. The goal would be to have a platform for artists to collaborate and further build our vision of an artist first community.”