【Report】December 13 Symposium on Virtual Production for Education: Webinar Report Released

NEWS

2024.12.16

We are pleased to announce the release of a brief report on the Next-Generation Virtual Production Education Webinar held on Friday, December 13.

As virtual production gains increasing attention from various industries and academia, Asian Virtual Human Association (hereby as AVHA) believes that 2025 will be a year of accelerated user adoption for virtual production. In the past two years, the media has been overly focused on which studios have invested heavily in building larger and taller LED stages. However, thanks to industry efforts, creators can now experiment with virtual production processes and produce various video products using lower budgets and simpler hardware and software combinations without being limited to serving only the film industry.

Therefore, AVHA will be adding a new competition category for high schools in 2025 to promote virtual production further down to K-12 education. We have also invited sponsor Zukunft Works Ltd to provide free virtual production software for six months to high schools interested in participating. For more details, please refer to our competition website, which is scheduled to be launched in January 2025.

This online seminar specially invited three university professors from three different Asian cities who teach virtual production to share their teaching achievements from their respective perspectives. The seminar was conducted in both Chinese and Japanese, and the recordings will be shared with the general public interested in virtual production with the speakers' permission.

Professor Wang Tai-rui, the department head of Mass Communication at Chinese Culture University, used the music video "Falling in Love with Dopamine" produced by his team for the girl group "T.O.Y." as an example to illustrate how, by combining virtual production and generative AI, mass communication majors, who were previously less considered as the production center, can also assist MV directors in completing a stunning MV.

Professor Kenji Watanabe from the International Professional University of Technology in Tokyo shared his team's multiple projects driven by programming. Three different types of white spheres, including AR, 3D models, and live-action videos, displayed similar co-moving behaviors as if they were in the same space, which was visually stunning. Over 500 virtual humans were active in Shinjuku during the Edo period, and the background was changed to the modern skyscrapers of Shinjuku, giving people a sense of time travel.

Wang Zheng, a teacher from the Academy of Fine Arts at Beijing Film Academy, elaborated on how his team, during the 2024 48H Virtual Production Filming Contest, developed virtual human characters customized for real actors based on the competition theme announced by our association, and created virtual assets that complemented the storyline, and built the foreground with mud, wires, and server chassis, which was truly inspiring.

For the actual highlights of the speeches, please refer to the following recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRZnJPbHIwI