BROOKLYN, NY — Daddio, the new feature that screened at film festivals in Toronto and Tribeca, made extensive use of virtual production techniques. The film stars Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn, and tells the story of a young woman returning home to Manhattan after a trip. She grabs a cab from the airport and unexpectedly finds herself having life-changing conversations with its driver. The film, which was written and directed by Christy Hall, runs for 101 minutes but contains only two characters.
Hall chose to shoot using virtual production in order to reduce the need to rig a moving cab or pay fees for shoot locations. The technology also provided a number of additional benefits, including creating a safe and realistic set for the actors to perform in.
“I was excited to use the technology,” says Hall. “It created an immersive environment for the cast, so when Sean was driving, he kept almost being afraid he was going to hit things. And then Dakota looks out the window and cars are whizzing by. She could actually see the street and everything, so they're engaging with a real sense of time and place.”
Hall worked with 4Wall Entertainment’s (www.4wall.com) vice presidents of special projects Ben Danielowski and Mathew Leland, as well as virtual production supervisor Julian Sarmiento and Disguise (www.disguise.one) VP of virtual production Addy Ghani. First, the team mapped the taxi route Hall wanted Daddio’s characters to take on Google Street View. Then, they worked together with Plate Pros (www.platepros.com) to capture the route in the real world. They captured two hours of 4K car process plates in just one night of shooting. Once the route was captured, the team moved to production on 4Wall’s LED stage in Brooklyn. Using Disguise’s GX 3 media servers, all the car process plates were reprojected and played back onto the LED volume. A real New York taxi cab was then cut in half so the team could put the camera in front of Johnson to capture her performance.
“Using Disguise gave us the entire canvas,” says Leland, noting that with Disguise, they were able to easily twist and warp the flat car process plates into the correct perspective for the camera, as well as combine and play back multiple video plates in realtime. “That means that although we have these individual screens, it's all within one media server. It allows us to map however we want, whether we want perspective, sizing, we can really kind of change what's being reprojected onto those screens.”
“It would be impossible to make this feature with the budget we had without using virtual production,” adds Hall.
After a premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, Daddio was picked up by Sony Pictures Classics and is now screening in select cinemas across the United States and Canada. It has also been released on the streaming platforms Now TV and Roku.