Virtual Production
Why Extended Reality Needs a Reason Before It Needs Kit
Shannon Harvey explains how a self-funded 28-day case study answered the practical questions clients ask about virtual production, from color to tracking to cost.
Content creation for the world of extended reality Xr
Video from Ahead Of The Curve Real Time Conversations.
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How can a creative team learn extended reality production before clients ask for it?
Build a small, self-contained project with a real story, not just a tech demo. Shannon Harvey's team made four pieces in 28 days, including a short film, and the work exposed the real problems: color consistency across the chain, camera tracking, scale and workflow. Asking why a story needs the technology came first, and that answer shaped every technical choice.
In the summer of 2020, live events had stopped and most studios were waiting. Shannon Harvey, a creative technologist with roots in opera, directing and entertainment technology, chose a different route. Speaking with host Geoffrey Platt on Ahead of the Curve, he described how his team built its own extended reality projects to learn what the new medium could really do for clients.
His background made the question natural. For about fifteen years he had worked on bringing video game systems into live theatrical performance, consulting on lighting and video products, leading a degree course in live visual design, and running research on large concert tours. Extended reality, which blends LED stages, real-time engines, camera tracking and augmented effects, pulled all of those threads together.
Yet he saw a gap between owning equipment and knowing how to use it well. Many teams were building stages to experiment with surplus kit. His concern was different: how to explain the medium to clients, what it costs, where the hard problems sit, and how creatives can tell stories in it. The answer, he argued, starts with intention.
Key takeaways
- A tech demo proves the kit works, but only a project with a real story shows where the workflow breaks.
- Keeping color consistent from world building to LED wall to camera caused most of the post-production work.
- Camera and performer tracking is the first major hurdle that any extended reality team has to overcome.
- Ask why the story needs extended reality before choosing effects, engines or stage hardware for a project.
1. Moving past the tech demo
After a few weeks of setting up a stage with former students, Shannon Harvey reached a point where the tech demo phase was done. He could show how augmented reality worked, how an LED screen behaved and how tracking fit together. But with agencies furloughing staff and clients writing off the year, he realised that waiting for a paying brief would teach him very little.
So in July he put together a small team and set a harder goal: a narrative piece rather than a studio where someone simply presents. A story with specific shots forces specific answers. The team listed the technologies it wanted to test, then asked what story would give those tests a through line, and why each tool was needed at all.
The result was a self-contained case study. In 28 days the team of four built four pieces: a short film called Imagination, a training video, a live presentation and a sales demo. He planned to publish the hours, costs and problems as a case reference, so others in the community could learn from the experiment rather than repeat it.
2. Color, tracking and scale are the real work
The hardest lessons were practical. Color proved the biggest headache. World building began in one set of tools, moved into a real-time engine with a slightly different color space, then had to land on an LED wall and pass through a camera. Keeping that chain consistent from room to room, and even between angles in the same room, took most of the post-production effort.
Tracking came next. Knowing exactly where people, cameras and objects sit, across several systems talking to each other, is the foundation of working volumetrically. Scale caused subtler trouble. A small change to the camera perspective could break the match with the world, and the team learned that moving the virtual world is often far better than moving the camera itself.
Workflow mistakes taught their own lessons. He had assembled the virtual world in one modelling tool before rebuilding it in the engine that would render it, which meant building everything twice. His rule now is to assemble the world in the rendering engine from the start. Every team member also faced new software, so scaling people up was as much a challenge as the technology.
3. What the experiment cost and what it proved
He was open about the economics because he owned the intellectual property and was his own client. Using a partner studio's space in kind, he estimated that he spent around five percent of the commercial value of the work. Of the four projects, the two-minute short film took about sixty percent of his time, because of the detail and consistency it demanded.
That split matters for anyone pricing extended reality. Simpler formats, such as the training video and the live presentation, came in at a reasonable price point compared with staging the same event in person. A short narrative piece with many integrated effects, from real-time performer tracking to a digital avatar, sits at the expensive end, and clients need to understand why.
For Shannon Harvey, the deeper point is that extended reality is a new medium still defining its rules. It is not cinema, film or theater, and its delivery systems are scattered. He sees it as a way to bring audiences closer to stories, but only when the technology answers a real need in the story. Story drives everything, and the tools should serve it.
