THE GREAT WALL

Pier59 Studios’ founder and president Federico Pignatelli has long been a visionary when it comes to embracing the latest technology. This Fashion Week, he’s launching a new era of innovation with the debut of the Virtual Production Megawall. He and Steve Baum, project lead consultant for Virtual Production, tell The Daily about this technology expected to be a game changer in the fashion and advertising worlds.

Tell us a little about Virtual Production.

Federico Pignatelli: As a disruptive technology, Virtual Production is comparable to the digital photography revolution of the late ’90s. By delivering significant cost savings, while providing creative flexibility and quality control, Virtual Production is going to radically change the way fashion and advertising content will be produced. In simple terms, instead of going to a location to shoot, we bring the location of choice into our studios in a realistic and fully immersive context. In comparison, Virtual Production can even bring deeper market-changing conditions than the recent digital revolution as a natural advancement of it. I’m confident that the fashion and advertising industries will rapidly evaluate and adopt this technological advancement and fully embrace it. How did this project come to you?

Steve Baum: Federico has always been committed to the effect of digital technology and disruptive technology on the media and communications end of the business. Pier59 Studios was very involved in the transition from film to digital. He’s always had an eye out for the next great disruptive opportunity to come along. Virtual Production was starting to generate interest right before the pandemic, and it got going in the pandemic with the production of The Mandalorian. That caught his eye. He began to see this as the next natural evolution for Pier59 Studios.

Federico, why did you want to do this?

Pignatelli: It’s the logical evolution for Pier59. When I opened, it was analog photography. We had the No. 1 photographers in the world working in the studio, and they were attached to what they knew. They knew analog film. We went from digital photography to digital motion. Most of the advertising today is done in video and some in photography in still. Now we have the next evolution in advertising, and that is virtual. I wanted to bring Pier59 up to date. Everyone talks about virtual, virtual reality, and augmented reality. We’re entering an era of digital evolution. These large screens can bring any location you want into the studio, instead of the past where the team goes to a location. We know how complicated that is. We know how complicated it is to travel. We have the highest level of liability. The screen has a cost, but it’s a fraction of the cost of bringing people to a location.

Let’s say someone wanted to shoot on a beach. Would it look like a beach?

Pignatelli: We could present a beach to the client that they would like or if they want a specific beach, we can capture images of that beach. We would send someone there to capture the images and then use those images on the screen. Instead of sending the whole team, you send one or two people.

Wow! What are some of the other ways people will be saving money?

Pignatelli: The production companies will be saving money. For example, years ago a menthol cigarette brand wanted to do a shoot on a glacier, so I went with the photographers and crew to Alaska. Finding the location took us two days. We finally found the right location and the day we wanted to shoot, it started snowing and it kept snowing for days. Five days later, the photographer shot three models against a white wall. The whole thing cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. They couldn’t control the weather. Shooting in studio can eliminate these kinds of problems.

Roughly, how much will this cost to use?

Pignatelli: We haven’t set up a price yet, but we’re in the range of $50,000 to $60,000 a day for the Megawall.

Is the wall permanently in one place at Pier59?

Baum: It is, but we do have additional movable walls. We have side lighting walls made of LED panels that are used for creating additional lighting and reflections. We can bring them together for a smaller virtual shoot.

How long did this take to make?

Baum: We started designing and sourcing it at the beginning of the summer. We went through a number of suppliers for different options. One of the things I think we did incredibly well is we have an absolutely premium product. It’s a first-class professional installation. It will be convenient and easy for any production company to come in and utilize the stage. Most of these things will consist of a rat’s nest of wires and cable. Ours has been thought out all the way through. All the cable management is completely there. The studio floor is completely bare and ready for any production company to come in and bring their equipment and plug in to our stage.

Why did you want to launch it during Fashion Week?

Pignatelli: The fashion advertising community is there during Fashion Week. The

By EDDIE ROCHE

international community travels from Paris or London. What better time to launch than Fashion Week? We wanted to be the opening party for Fashion Week. It was a good opportunity to show the community this new technology.

Any other benefits?

Baum: One of the most significant ones is the ability to come into the studio, do a shoot, have the virtual environment set up the way you like, and then come back another time and set the stage exactly in the same condition you were in days, weeks, or months ago. Let's say you wanted to shoot a beautiful sunset scene at 4 p.m. in a spring or summer setting and your client realizes months later they want to do a reshoot or they need to adjust something. If we were doing this on location, the seasons have moved on, it’s now winter and we can’t get the same shot. If you come to the Virtual Production stage, you press a button and we’re right back to where we were months earlier.

What’s new with Industry Model Management?

Pignatelli: As any fashion service company, Industry is constantly evolving and on the forefront of new technologies in the media-entertainment field. Currently, we’re expanding on digital social media and also working on cutting-edge technologies, such as 3-D representation of models or avatars. Realistic avatars of models will allow models to be “eternal” in their current look and allow the ones that develop themselves as a brand to continue working conveniently and profitably for a longer time than the usual few years. From an operational point of view, Industry is already the largest model agency in Los Angeles and so the next big push is to have the New York office, strategically located in Pier59 Studios, to grow substantially more to rapidly surpass Los Angeles in revenues, as ultimately New York is the capital of the fashion world. With this goal, we have and are continuously expanding our model and agent roster.

Federico, you are always a visionary when it comes to the next thing. What do you think of the state of the industry right now?

Pignatelli: The advertising, fashion, and entertainment industries at large are faced, like any enterprise, with the technological revolution and so in need to adapt to it. Technology wants to bring more advancements and experiences, and generally at a lower cost, so it’s all about performance and efficiencies. The typical example of a substantial advancement in the digital media era is exactly what we’re now launching at Pier59 Studios with Virtual Production!

What else is new at Pier59?

Pignatelli: At Pier59 Studios we continuously strive, since we opened 27 years ago, to stay ahead of the market and technological changes and to continuously serve our clients, at our very best, with the top equipment and services available. The next step will be 3-D volumetric capture, on which we have already been experimentally working for few years. It’s a technology that allows to transform 2-D images in 3-D in a realistic mode as the world we live in is a three-dimensional one. This is important, because it means that we will be able to dramatically reduce the costs associated with post-production, such as 3-D facial and body animation.

By The Numbers

The LED Volume consists of a main 65-foot curved LED screen and 40-foot articulating ceiling, housing more than 25 million pixels capable of generating more than 25 billion colors. The 4K system is controlled by one of the most powerful virtual production systems in the world, generating more than 200 teraflops (200 trillion calculations per second) of computational power. The interactive image-based lighting is delivered at 1,500 nits (more than 5,000 lumens), producing photorealistic lighting, shadows, and reflections.