Virtual Reality Rehearsals for Acting with Visual Effects

This paper presents the use of Virtual Reality (VR) for movie actors rehearsal of VFX-enhanced scenes. The impediment behind VFX scenes is that actors must be filmed in front of monochromatic green or blue screens with hardly any cue to the digital scenery that is supposed to surround them. The problem is worsens when the scene includes interaction with digital partners. The actors must pretend they are sharing the set with imaginary creatures when they are, in fact, on their own on an empty set. To support actors in this complicated task, we introduce the use of VR for acting rehearsals not only to immerse actors in the digital scenery but to provide them with advanced features for rehearsing their play. Indeed, our approach combines a fully interactive environment with a dynamic scenario feature to allow actors to become familiar with the virtual elements while rehearsing dialogue and action at their own speed. The interactive and creative rehearsals enabled by the system can be either single-user or multi-user. Moreover, thanks to the wide range of supported platforms, VR rehearsals can take place either on-set or off-set. We conducted a preliminary study to assess whether VR training can replace classical training. The results show that VR-trained actors deliver a performance just as good as ordinarily trained actors. Moreover, all the subjects in our experiment preferred VR training to classic training.