Beyond Realities: Inside Eight Days of Virtual Production Training
Beyond Realities, Eirmersive's free virtual production training programme, ran from 10 - 19 June at The Immersive Studio, IADT Dún Laoghaire. Delivered in partnership with Orijinn, IADT and the TU RISE Elevate Programme, the eight-day intensive brought together creative and technical practitioners for a hands-on introduction to one of the most exciting formats in screen production today.
The programme aimed to take participants through an arc of understanding, building, operating, solving problems, and delivering. And that’s exactly what happened!
Starting with the fundamentals
Day one opened with the basics: what virtual production actually is, where it sits across film, broadcast and unscripted formats and the roles that make a VP set function. From there, participants moved into Unreal Engine and Virtual Art Department thinking, learning to source assets, manage scale and build lighting into a digital environment.
The programme functioned from a phones-first philosophy, with day three allowing participants to explore camera tracking and the relationship between physical and virtual cameras using nothing more than their own phones. By the time the group stepped onto the LED volume on day four, the language of virtual production was already familiar and accessible.
Building and testing under pressure
The middle days of the programme shifted from understanding to doing. Participants calibrated the wall and pushed their environments onto the screen as a team.
One of the most memorable parts of the week was the structured failure-injection session, where breakdowns were deliberately introduced mid-scene. It is one thing to learn how a VP set should run. It is another to learn how to trouble shoot when something goes wrong in front of the room, and that is exactly the skill this programme was made to teach.
A taste of every role
Across days six and seven, the group worked through a full rehearsal cycle, rotating through every key production role, from director to camera operator to LED volume operator, so that everyone experienced the demands of each role firsthand.
The showcase
Day eight brought it all together. Crew call, final calibration and a full shoot of each participant's scene, captured for their own showreel footage!
Beyond Realities was designed around the belief that the skills that matter most in virtual production are reliability, communication, calm under pressure and the ability to recover when something breaks, which more often than not, can only be learned by doing the job itself. Real experience. In a real VP environment.
Beyond Realities was supported by Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland through the Screen Stakeholders Funding Scheme, and delivered in partnership with Eirmersive, Orijinn, IADT and the TU RISE Elevate Programme.