The CEO of Rainbow CGI spoke to us about Cinecittà’s new Virtual Production course, which he himself is coordinating, and the enormous potential offered by this new technology

LuceLabCinecittà is a training and refresher course for workers, managers, students and aspiring professionals in the film and audiovisual sector, run by Cinecittà and Archivio Luce. Financed with funds from Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) and free to everyone, these new courses have been underway for a few weeks: in October, the Historic Archive course began (for scanner operators and film technicians), and in November, the Artisan Workshop (carpentry, painting and decorating, tailoring and costume making, and hair and make-up) and Virtual Production courses kicked off. We spoke about the latter - which will continue until June and involves 360 hours of theoretical and practical training as well as 180 hours of workshop practice training - with its educational coordinator Francesco Mastrofini, who’s also the co-founder and CEO of Rainbow CGI, the animation studio behind Winx Club.

Cineuropa: What do we mean when we speak of virtual production?
Francesco Mastrofini: It’s a field which concerns lots of different professions and kinds of equipment; it’s a proper digital set involving a huge LED wall, TV cameras, 3D backgrounds and characters which could either be real or digital. All this digital content results in new approaches. What I mean is, when you work with a green screen, actors used to have to imagine something was there during filming. Now we’re able to immerse actors and directors into the environment we’re visualising, thanks to systems which are incredibly complex to operate.

You speak about green screen in the past tense; has virtual production already replaced it?
For now, the two techniques are co-existing, but virtual production will definitely replace green screen. The sector is expanding rapidly; a range of businesses are investing in virtual production studios, but we’re not quite there in terms of expertise. Hence the need for Cinecittà, which has a huge studio (editor’s note: Teatro 18, the biggest in Europe) in which to train people, and to collaborate with companies like ours who can take care of this training.

What will students on the Cinecittà course actually be doing?
An entire workflow is needed to capture environments and characters realistically. And this complex workflow concerns a wide range of professions whose scope ranges from live-action worlds to fully digital worlds. Our students will cover environment modelling, which is the capacity to digitally create settings and the objects of which scenes are composed, which can be carried out by way of traditional 3D graphics or through filming and scanning the settings themselves using drones; then there’s sculpting, or organic modelling of extra characters, which is used a lot in fantasy films; right on through to surfacing, which is background colouring, a technique which recreates the main existing materials and which crosses over with the more traditional processes of carpentry and painting, which serve as an important base for tackling the digital side of things.

How can virtual production bring down production costs for films or TV series?
Imagine having to shoot a scene at sunset in a traditional setting. We have to mobilise a team of 100 people but we’ve only got a few minutes to shoot, 10 or 15 minutes max, because the sunset is disappearing and the colours are changing. And if the scene is especially complex, we’ll have to come back the following day, with extra costs and no doubt different conditions to negotiate. But now there’s this totally synchronised environment, where everything is reconstructed virtually: actors are immersed in it and illuminated by the film itself rather than by projectors. Obviously, it’s expensive to set up this kind of technology at this point in time, but you save so much money elsewhere. New technologies are always more expensive when they first come out, but then the market assimilates them, more competitors start to produce them and they become more affordable. Virtual production is an artistic, technical aid which also aims for sustainability in production: it just has to find its way, we’re still in the early stages.

And films and TV series aren’t the only contexts where virtual production can be used. I’m thinking of the recent U2 concert in Las Vegas, which took place in a fully immersive setting.
It’s a technique which can be used for so many purposes, from TV studios to live events and commercials. It’s something we’ll use more and more as time goes by, but it’s also up to directors to use their creativity in order to understand these new technologies and what they can offer.

In the meantime, the first course in virtual production is already underway. When does the application process for the next course open and what are the entry criteria?
The course is pioneering for us too, there’s not a great deal of experience in the field within the sector; we’re looking to attract expertise from all over Italy. We really believe in it, the youngsters are enthusiastic about it, they’ve only just got started but they’re already really motivated. The classes are composed of 20-25 people; there’s a pre-selection interview - it’s important that they have a few basic skills to begin with, but not that many. The application process for the next course will open between May and June, and these sessions will definitely go ahead until 2026.

(Translated from Italian)