Based in Woodland Hills, CA, Light Sail VR (www.lightsailvr.com) was one of the first studios to put Blackmagic Design’s Ursa Cine Immersive camera to use. The Ursa Cine Immersive is a digital film camera designed to create Apple Immersive Video. It features a lightweight body and industry standard connections, along with a fixed custom lens system and dual 8K sensors with 16 stops of dynamic range, which is uses to record immersive video to a single Blackmagic raw file.
Matthew Celia (pictured) is an Emmy Award-winning director, as well a co-founder of Light Sail VR, which specializes in creating immersive content.
“We’ve been doing immersive films for about 10 years,” he shares. “And in that time, we kind of established ourselves as having a reputation of doing very high-quality work. Now we do a lot of our work for Meta, and this camera was built in collaboration with Apple. But the truth is: immersive is immersive, and storytelling is storytelling, and at the end of the day, what people do with this camera is going to define the medium.”
Celia likens it to the early 1900s and how storytellers were trying to establish a cinematic language within a new medium - film.
“Movies and TV are very closely related,” he notes. “There are some key differences in how you tell stories in both platforms. One is like a two-hour narrative. One can be 10 seasons. But immersive is a physically-different narrative. The way the camera feels, the way the audiences connect with it, the way that they engage with the medium is very different than anything before.”
Blackmagic reached out to him to introduce the Light Sail VR team to their new camera, as well as to get feedback.
“They were like, ‘We think we have something that’s very interesting for you, that you’re going to really like,’” he recalls. “We connected over it and I said, ‘I think this is going to be the next big moment in this emerging media.’ I had that same feeling several years ago with Canon, when they released their dual fish-eye lens. That took all of these duct-taped projects that we were doing and brought it to a (new) level. A big company saying, ‘We think immersive is going to be a (big) thing.’ So, when Blackmagic said, ‘We think immersive is going to be a thing,’ and brought all of their engineering resources to it, it was a big deal. It’s a very big validation for what I’ve been dedicating the last decade of my life to — figuring out how to tell stories. And Blackmagic is unique because no other company can take your pixel from capture all the way through final delivery. That for me was really amazing because what I’ve learned in the last 10 years with immersive is, the treatment of those pixels is so delicate, because you’re pushing the limits of the technology.”
The team at Light Sail VR rents gear on a project-by-project basis, as is the case with the Ursa Cine Immersive camera. In fact, when Post spoke with Celia, the studio was planning a shoot that would make used of five immersive cameras.
“I buy very few cameras,” shares Celia. “I think cameras, in general, are a horrible investment because the technology changes so fast…This camera though had two things that really made me change my mind. The first was, the quality jump is so extreme that I felt like for the kinds of productions that I do — with AAA-level talent, with big budgets, big audiences — I would lose those jobs if I wasn’t filming with the absolute best. And then also, Apple and Blackmagic have collaborated together to define a new workflow that I think takes some of the headaches out of immersive production. I think that they are actively working on how to make this more accessible to traditional filmmakers.”
Celia sees lots of opportunity for VR experiences that go beyond gaming. The studio created a six-part horror series for Meta titled The Faceless Lady, and at press time, Light Sail VR was working with a documentary filmmaker to create an immersive experience that would tie into an IMAX film about the wetlands of the Louisiana Bayou.
“I think it’s a really cool time,” he states. “For a long time, headsets were a lot about gaming, and they still are. It’s an amazing gaming machine. The games are super immersive, and you feel like your whole body’s into it. But the data that was coming back was that people really enjoyed watching video content. They really enjoyed concerts. They enjoyed live sports…I think what we’re seeing now is that Apple — and now Google, and of course Meta — they have identified that gaming is not the only thing you can do with these devices. They can be the ultimate entertainment device wherever you are. I think that phrase really strikes true for me, because more and more, I think we’re having to meet audiences where they are. This is offering something that I think audiences are craving. They’re craving this idea of immersion. They’re craving something that’s a little bit more unique, special and different.”