Sensors dotting an actor’s black suit transpose his movements on to an animated creature. A huge monster curls his paw over a ruined church wall, seamlessly blending the virtual and the real. A curved screen surrounds the audience with a lifelike range of mountains and forests.
These are digital sets at Belfast’s new £72mn Studio Ulster, one of the most technologically advanced virtual production centres in the world, which is pitching itself as a one-stop shop for moviemakers, game designers, animators and film editors.
Northern Ireland’s film and TV industry made its name with medieval fantasy blockbuster Game of Thrones, shot on location in the region, and has gone from strength to strength with top-tier productions including the new live action How to Train Your Dragon movie, Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, The School for Good and Evil and The Northman.
Studio Ulster’s chief executive Declan Keeney said it will now be catapulted into an even bigger league, with “virtually limitless” possibilities.
“We are a destination of choice. We can recreate incredible environments in the studio now — we can bring new productions, at every scale, to Belfast that we wouldn’t have attracted before,” he told the Financial Times.
The immersive wraparound mountain landscape, with an illuminated castle and tree branches swaying in the breeze, spans what Studio Ulster says is the tallest motion capture stage in Europe.
The 75,000 square feet studio was part-financed by the UK government via a Belfast Region City Deal grant and developed by Ulster University in partnership with Belfast Harbour, supported by Northern Ireland Screen. It boasts special effects facilities including robotics, automation, remote sensor laser technology known as Lidar, 3D and 4D scanning, plus LED volume walls — the successor to green screens.
Actors wearing sensors can be manipulated into computer generated images — think of Gollum in Lord of the Rings — and images filmed in daylight can be made to look like they were shot at night.
On another set, young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, trained in virtual production and games design in one of Ulster University’s “talent pipelines”, work on the details of a gaming world.
“I’ve seen lots of film sets but I’ve never seen anything to this degree of technical excellence — and I am hard to impress,” said Michele Devlin, director of the Belfast Film Festival.
Because of its level of automation, Keeney said Studio Ulster offers speed and flexibility. “It’s not just one stage built and fixed . . . like nearly all of our competitors,” he said. “We can change that to a completely new configuration in half a day to one day. Anywhere else in the world, it takes between three and seven weeks.”
In an expensive industry, virtual production is faster, cheaper and more environmentally friendly as crews do not have to be sent on location.
“The whole industry is looking towards AI and virtual production solutions to help with stretched budgets,” said Paula Heffernan, head of production at Element Pictures, whose movies include Oscar-winner Poor Things.
Other advanced and virtual production facilities exist — Australia’s Docklands studio is one — but “to be based in Northern Ireland will be a real selling point for incoming productions”, she added.
Studio Ulster is one of five so-called CoSTAR labs across the UK, government-backed hubs encouraging innovation in the creative industries. UK tax credits of 34 per cent for films, high-end TV and video games also enhance Belfast’s appeal, Devlin added, while the English-speaking workforce is a plus for US productions.
Northern Ireland boasts three studios besides Studio Ulster, but Richard Williams, chief executive of Northern Ireland Screen, said the new facility takes the region’s industry to the “next level . . . its potential is enormous”.
He expected it in time to bring an extra £50mn to £100mn a year in private investment into the sector while Keeney predicted as many as 600 new jobs.
Creative industries contributed £1.6bn to the Northern Ireland economy in 2022, 3.2 per cent of the region’s gross value added, according to the most recent official figures, with 39,000 people employed.
Within that, the film sector’s output rose 7.4 per cent in 2022 compared with 2021, more than double the overall growth rate from the region’s total GVA.
Netflix’s How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, by award-winning Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee, and Game of Thrones prequel, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms — although not being shot at Studio Ulster — are among other upcoming productions from Northern Ireland.
Even before its formal launch last week, Studio Ulster — located at Belfast harbour near to where the Titanic ocean liner was built — was used to film a BBC docudrama called Titanic Sinks Tonight, to be distributed internationally by Sony. Some of the upcoming series of award-winning Northern Irish police drama Blue Lights has also been filmed at the facility.
Keeney said non-disclosure agreements meant he could not name future productions but “major streamers are coming next year” and “very big” feature films.
For Element Pictures’ Heffernan, “we’d definitely, absolutely be looking to use Studio Ulster if we can find the right project”.
