In a recent Mercedes-Benz commercial, a glossy car reflects a city’s bright lights, its driver gazing out the window at the streets rushing by. But the car was not shot in a city, nor did the video’s producers step foot in an outdoor setting.
The commercial was instead filmed in Vū Technologies’ studio in Tampa, Florida, a deception made possible by towering LED screens that create hyper-realistic locations for video producers and filmmakers. Its latest location is Las Vegas, where the virtual production studio is reshaping local filmmaking, its founders said.
Vū Technologies will open its local 40,000 square-foot space April 22 and showcase two variations of LED screen studios. These new resources will elevate filmmaking and commercials as well as unfasten new avenues for conferences, said CEO Tim Moore.
“Vegas is an incredible entertainment market, but it’s also a great destination for a studio,” he said. “There’s a lot of entertainment already here that could utilize this space.”
Moore founded Vū in Tampa in 2020, when he said he saw an opportunity for alternate filmmaking during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Production during the pandemic became defined by new rules to limit the spread of the disease, including social distancing, increased testing and limits on travel to on-site filming. The LED screens instead bring the location to filmmakers, and once video production is complete, viewers will not be able to eye which shots are filmed before the LED screens and which are not, Moore said.
Vū opened another studio in Nashville, Tennessee, in February 2021, and its Las Vegas location will be the first of its kind to settle in locally. Moore said he plans on expanding Vū in the coming year to 10 novel locations.
Las Vegas is attractive as a third location because of Nevada’s incentive programs, like tax credits, for film and video production companies. Moore also said he anticipates much higher revenue from the Las Vegas location because its studio is larger than Tampa’s, which brought in $7 million in 2021.
“We didn’t expect that the business would grow at the rate it is,” Moore said. “We were servicing our clients that we already had there until we realized that so many people were flying into Tampa, and most of our clients were from out of town. Now we’re sort of moving to those markets.”
A recent $17 million investment by ADX Labs, Topmark Partners and Angel will also expand the company’s current locations.
“One of the toughest and costliest elements to film production is scheduling the director, the producer and the talent to be in the same room at the same time,” president and co-founder Jon Davila said in a news release about the funding. “Vū’s virtual capabilities remove this element from the equation—a true game-changer for the film and entertainment industry.”
The technique of using LED screens in filmmaking is uncommon but not unusual. Filmmakers on “The Mandalorian” television show recreated lush settings on vivid LED screens for about 50% of its first season.
They said this format was preferable to the industry-standard green screen because of the eponymous character’s green armor. If the show used a green screen, the post-production editing to eliminate the armor’s green shine and fill in the background would have taken far longer compared with shooting on the LED screens, which Moore said require little to no post-production editing.
Vū’s facilities also do not require cameramen to be on site, with robot cameras trained to shoot, angle and time their shots in a highly calculated way.
For a Jack Daniels commercial that requires a whiskey pour shot, for example, the cameras would be timed exactly with the liquor’s pour from the bottle. This information would then be stored and shared to cameras in Vū’s other studios, allowing for flexibility in filming should the filmmakers need to shoot in another location, Moore said.
Each space varies in size and price, with the smaller option—an LED dome, where the company’s robot “cameramen” enter an immersive, 360-degree space to film—starting at $30,000 per day. The 140-by-19-foot screen, the studio’s largest option, goes for $65,000 per day, and to reserve both comes in at about $100,000, Moore said.
Moore said he thinks because of this streamlined, stripped down process, there could be a shift in how the industry approaches in-person work.
“I think a transition will take time,” he said. “But I think that as more opportunities grow in this space, people are going to be incentivized to transition.”
Vice President Jason Soto, who will oversee the Las Vegas location, said there will be about 32 to 35 staff members on site, with separate crew per production that rents out the facility.
Soto said he thinks the LED screens and Vū’s studio can also be essential for technology conferences like CES, which takes place annually in Las Vegas, as well as teleconferences, exploded onto the massive screens.
“We wholeheartedly think that we barely uncovered what can be done,” Soto said. “We’re creative guys, and we’ve got a lot of great ideas. But to us, the best idea takes place when one of the clients comes in and goes, ‘What if we could do this?’ ”
Vū also plans to collaborate with UNLV’s Office of Economic Development, providing paid internships for students as well as full-time jobs for recent graduates. Jamie Schwartz, director of Industry and Business Engagement at UNLV, said the jobs—which would teach students how to use and monitor the LED screen technology—will be promoted this summer, aiming to start the coming fall semester.
Schwartz said these opportunities would appeal to students in the College of Fine Arts, as well as those studying computer science.
When fine arts students, specifically ones who study filmmaking, graduate, they typically move to Los Angeles or Burbank, California, for work, Schwartz said. The partnership with Vū, she said, will ideally keep more fine arts workers local.
“There is, overall, in that industry a shortage of workers, even in Los Angeles,” she said. “We see this as a really exciting avenue for students coming out the university as well as the entertainment district in Las Vegas.”
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