The VP Futures programme: A fractionated training environment for UK creative companies

Abstract

How do trainees from diverse disciplinary backgrounds manage entry to Virtual Production (VP) – a convergence zone where game design, real-time technologies, and traditional filmmaking meet? Developed in response to skills shortages highlighted in the 2021 and 2023 StoryFutures Academy VP Skills reports, the VP Futures training programme also served as an R&D intervention for creative companies engaging with this evolving landscape, the programme brought together Epic Games and Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) to co-deliver an intensive series of masterclasses and mentorship, guiding eight selected companies through 8 weeks of de-risked R&D grounded in real-world production practices. Using Playbooks, vlogs, and VP Skills Matrix audits as evidence, this paper focuses on three companies with differing disciplinary backgrounds – animation and game engines, documentary filmmaking, and theatre/immersive design – to examine how creative teams established anchor points from their home disciplines into VP, shifting their practice as their understanding evolved. An exploratory reframing of VP is given, using Galison’s concepts of ‘trading zones’ and ‘interactional expertise’, alongside Ash’s concept of the ‘interface envelope’. The paper examines how the VP Futures programme, and VP training more widely, can be understood as a fractionated training-trading environment – where teams from diverse ‘fractions’ of the creative industries are able to design and work with VP interface environments and develop interdisciplinary capability in VP through shared practice.

Introduction

In an issue of the British Cinematographer, VP Supervisor Adrian Weber described a ‘collision of terminologies’ within VP, and explained that he saw his role as being that of a translator, especially in the early days of VP adoption and expansion in the sector; It’s quite difficult to combine all the Departments. We have people speaking film language, people from the gaming industry, and people from VFX… What does a director of photography mean by “two stops darker”? For a game artist that’s “What the hell is that, half as bright, a bit brighter?”’ (Rhodes, 2024). These comments underline the wider importance of communicative practices in preventing on-set problems, and the need to achieve a shared understanding of roles and responsibilities across filmmaking departments.

This paper presents a case study on VP training from the VP Futures programme in 2022, during a period of rapid VP expansion in the UK, when many creative companies were asking what it takes to become VP-ready. VP is frequently portrayed as a rapidly evolving landscape, reflecting the ongoing transformation of filmmaking practices. As Barnett et al. (2025) say, ‘its practice and pedagogy, its concepts, and even terminology are in flux, and in some cases contested’. A key challenge for VP training providers is acknowledging the diverse entry points for those coming to VP from a variety of disciplines and sub-sectors within the creative industries, each bringing distinct terminologies and practices – from game design and VFX to theatre, live performance, immersive experience design, and conventional filmmaking.

The Virtual Production Glossary offers a succinct definition of VP:

‘Virtual production uses technology to join the digital world with the physical world in real-time. It enables filmmakers to interact with the digital process in the same ways they interact with live-action production’. (The Virtual production Glossary, 2025)

We approach the question of how learners adjust their existing mindsets to VP with this definition in mind, examining how disciplines with different approaches to filmmaking can work together successfully across both digital and physical spheres. We address these questions by taking a detailed look at the experiences of a selection of creative companies participating in the VP Futures training programme, interpreting the data through the lens of a review of the literature.

Literature review

‘Virtual production’ has been described as an umbrella term, encompassing ‘a broad range of technical and creative frameworks that utilises computer-generated imagery in real-time combined with extended reality – innovations of virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality’ (Hendricks, 2022). VP is a technically demanding combination of new and older technologies integrated within traditional production filmmaking frameworks (Bennett, 2020; Bennett and Kruse, 2015; Kadner, 2019). Despite the rapid growth of VP in recent years, literature regarding training and skills development for VP remains sparse. UK educational institutions such as The National Film and Television School, which offers VP certification, presents VP to newcomers as ‘an extension of the physical space’ (NFTS, 2024). One recent survey of UK training in VP highlights the ‘pressing need to address skills shortages with courses that focus on developing technical optimisation skills alongside adaptable mindsets’ and emphasises ‘the human element – creativity, adaptability, and teamwork’ (Hobbs, 2025).

A number of privately run training opportunities have been established since VP Futures – Starting Pixel, Final Pixel, and others. The focus of this paper in on partnerships between educational institutions and commercial VP companies, which have led to new ‘hybrid training structures’, say Kavakli and Cremona (2022). They argue for shared approaches to ‘solve industry-identified problems through industry-led collaborative research partnerships’ with an emphasis on joint R&D for students, educators, and professionals. Barnett et al. observe that any university-based VP studio with ‘strong ties to industry locally, nationally, and internationally’ is in a good position to pursue what they term ‘integrated VP’, while exploring virtual aesthetics and designing educational programmes (Barnett et al., 2025). Curricula in VP, they say, should not lag behind industry advancements.

Industry practices

The 2023 StoryFutures Academy Report on VP skills emphasises that an understanding of VP roles and responsibilities is especially important for developing communicational or ‘soft’ skills, for example in the Technical Director role: ‘knowing who to speak to, and how to speak to the Camera Department’ and familiarity with ‘setiquette’, that is, the expected professional conduct on-set (Bennett et al., 2023). The authors describe how this can be broken down into personal attributes such as: having an appetite for collaboration, having a responsive approach to problem-solving in real-time processes and being willing to create documentation for new workflows to help with on-boarding and preserve learnings.

An earlier StoryFutures Academy Interim Report from the same authors (Bennett and Heath, 2021) offered several recommendations for addressing skills gaps:

• Increase opportunities for on-the-job-learning in a de-risked environment.

• Improve on-set understandings of roles and responsibilities including communications between departments.

• Foster a common language for VP.

Director of Production at ILM Julie Peng, interviewed in September 2021 by the same authors, emphasised the importance of giving VP trainees the opportunity to learn from other disciplines and to then fold this back into their ‘home discipline’, an observation not limited to technical skills. Communication skills affect all areas of VP including the more technical areas. Peng addresses repeated cultural issues on projects where filmmakers and game designers seem to be using ‘two different languages’:

‘I did not appreciate until we were faced with the fallout of this, how extremely different the points of view are... one of the training opportunities is to actually acknowledge the difference in approach that these two industries have. The goal then is to figure out a way to take the best of both and merge them’. (Julie Peng, interview, September 2021).

Crew shortages and retention issues at all levels and across all types of film production were reported in the BFI Skills Review 2022, which found evidence of negative working practices where ‘unacceptable behaviours remain commonplace’ and where ‘crew [are] being promoted too early and without the necessary support, leading to increasing levels of stress on set’ (British Film Institute, 2022). The rapid growth of VP has created significant opportunities for employees to gain valuable experience beyond the traditional disciplinary pathways to promotion, a simultaneous disruption and democratisation of traditional filmmaking. Some have observed the increasing importance of skills and competencies as opposed to production experience and networks for trainees (Swords and Willment, 2024). Bennett, Najafi and Jackson note that one of the benefits of learning about VP in an environment with a mix of disciplines, is to gain insight into how these disciplines manage their tasks differently (Bennett et al., 2023). To date, however, there is little quantitative research on the impacts of this on the sector in terms of job security, precarity and inclusion. Wilment and co-authors suggest ‘the continuing importance of professional (or “transferable”) skills… skills such as patience, adaptability and communication’ (Willment et al., 2025). The authors recommend:

• Tailoring training opportunities to different career levels.

• Providing paid opportunities to work on set, addressing inequalities of access.

• Providing undergraduate students with team-working exercises.

• Other professional development including training in assertiveness and managing difficult conversations.

Immersive teaching methods

Immersive VP technologies are ‘excellent teaching tools that can empower students beyond a mere technical proficiency’ say Boutellier and Raptis (2023). Educators have developed student project presentations with virtual video production and AR techniques (Collin and Westin, 2022). Game-based learning for media production has been discussed as far back as 2005 in connection with Machinima production, a precursor to VP filmmaking (Carroll, 2005). Some have surveyed the benefits of affordable VR simulations and ‘educational virtual environments’ that replicate complex production scenarios impractical to construct physically (Forero-Serna, 2025); others advocate VP as a format for teaching film production remotely (Ziemsen, 2017). One way of circumventing unpaid entry-level work experience was to develop a scenario-based VR game set in a virtual TV studio, with ‘character cards’, filmed interviews and resources available for educators, designed to foster situational ‘soft’ skills (Brereton, 2025). Such initiatives also serve the interests of a recent call to fully understand the materiality of VP filmmaking, especially in the ‘spectatorial, touristic, and legal changes’ that it brings (Jones, 2025) as the wider context for VP training.

Embodiment

Some research shows that students (and educators) become immersed in projects in a way that is more embodied and phenomenologically different from traditional productions. Actors are ‘immersed in the same light as the elements represented in the visual environment that surrounds them’ (Joel Bennett, 2020). Kavakli and Cremona describe ‘the radical shift in the dynamics of performativity’ in VP, where ‘actors perform with the technology’. In this interpretation, each step of the VP process responds to all other steps – ‘in a horizontal ontology that puts human actors at the same level of technological actors… their performance is radically altered, influenced as it is by the performance of the technology that surrounds them’. This applies as much to filmmakers as to actors, as all those involved are engaged in a shared ‘performative loop’ facilitated by the VP stage (Kavakli and Cremona, 2022). Ilmaranta suggests that the highly embodied experience of VP simulated environments percolates into all Departments and all roles, ‘conveying a thickened sense of immersive presence’ (Ilmaranta, 2020). Elsewhere, Carpio and Birt discuss the role of a VP Embodiment Director (Carpio and Birt, 2022). The ‘almost visceral’ reactions of students upon seeing their VP environments in the volume for the first time was remarked on by Boutellier and Raptis (2023). Carroll and Cameron note that performing with technology provides a different type of agency: ‘Video games force us to exert agency and become the character’, and this role-shifting perspective is also a useful device in VP training contexts they say: ‘far from being an obstacle, this ability to toggle roles and perspectives becomes a critical tool in the learning moment’ (Carroll and Cameron, 2005). Recently Joel Bennett has added new dimensions to his ‘Immersive Performance Environment (IPE)’ framework, bringing social immersion and the perception of time into the schema (Bennett, 2025).

A common language for VP

The literature described above, specific to VP, suggests a number of opportunity areas that can be developed for training in VP filmmaking. Reflecting the multidisciplinary character of VP, and the challenges of bringing together people from varied disciplines and with different approaches to filmmaking, a key area to be developed is in fostering the development of shared logics, a common language, and unified terminologies (Figure 1). To help elicit the details of how language is used, and the way in which they support complex and evolving VP practices, we turn to science and technology studies (STS) where an analytical approach has been developed to understand how science practice develops across disciplines possessing contrasting language and logics.

Figure 1.

A detail from the ‘Shoot Day Protocol Sheet’ provided to participants, showing the ‘Lingo Cheat Sheet’, current terminologies and set conventions from VP shoots in industry. Note that terms such as ‘Roll up’ may be specific to some areas of the sector, and that although the term ‘Brain Bar’ is in wide use, it is contested by some who seek an alternative term.

Peter Galison’s notion of the ‘trading zone’ is ‘a region of exchange between different groups or individuals in which some material and some theoretical moves are shared despite global disjunction’ (Galison, 1997). Following Galison, Collins et al. (2007) define trading zones as ‘locations in which communities with a deep problem of communication manage to communicate’. An example is the Fermilab, where in 1975 experimental and theoretical physicists created their own trading zone, a joint ‘Experimental/Theoretical seminar’. The goal was to bridge scientific communities working in differing disciplines and traditions.

Building on Galison, Collins and Evans describe how ‘interactional expertise’ is acquired when ‘an outsider learns enough vocabulary and characteristic ways of speaking to simulate a “real” gravitational physicist’ (Collins and Evans, 2002); ‘culturally dissimilar groups’ were bridged by developing a creole or ‘jargon’. These are ‘fractions of cultures as the medium of interchange’, says Galison, and are often the first step towards developing a fully fledged ‘inter-language’. Some parts of speech and knowledge are ‘bracketed-out’ – strategically omitted in a tacit agreement between parties, allowing them to exchange more freely than would otherwise be possible. In this way, shared ‘theoretical moves’ and supportive continuities create the conditions for exchange (Galison, 1997), including:

• Pedagogical continuities, related to training.

• Technical continuities, related to the systems in use.

• Demonstrative continuities, related to the means of argumentation.

While this approach was developed to explain communication across disciplinary boundaries in physics, it can be seen how it might be possible to identify comparable pedagogical, technical and demonstrative continuities in VP, a convergence space for filmmaking and game design. Another way to think about VP is to characterise them as ‘temporary trading zones’, with continuities and inter-language development pursued through ‘linguistic representations, project management tools and material representations’ (Lenfle and Söderlund, 2018).

The Medialab-Prado was described as a ‘citizens laboratory’ designed to transmit knowledge across communities visiting the world-famous Prado museum in Madrid (Gàmez-Pérez, 2016). Given the sensitivities of collaborating across disciplinary boundaries and the potential for a ‘collision of terminologies’, as has sometimes been seen in VP, the notion of trading zones offers a way to raise awareness of and then design out such collisions. Speaking about cultural production, Galison has more recently remarked:

‘Collaborating across boundaries requires a certain kind of attentive listening... Entering the trading zones between fields demands a certain suspension of our confident, go-to forms of reasoning in order to hear our collaborators’ (Galison and Kugele, 2020).

VP as an interface environment

Another key area emerging from the literature specific to VP is the potential for training to leverage the sense of embodied immersion that working in VP brings with it, along with what might be called the gamification of certain aspects of VP filmmaking. To help draw out the shared spaces and the experiential qualities of working in VP, and to render these qualities analytically accessible, we turn to HCI where the study of game and interface design has addressed similar aims.

James Ash developed the concept of an ‘interface environment’ and the ‘interface envelope’ to describe game designs engineered to sustain the intense involvement of players for as long as possible (Ash, 2016). Engagement within an interface envelope, he says, is an emergent effect of the interplay (or ‘encounter’) between technical objects (those produced by humans) and other kinds of objects. In VP filmmaking, for example, we might identify Ash’s ‘technical objects’ as digital assets and processes, objects in Unreal, 3d assets, lights and scenes, visual effects, filmmaking equipment, physical lights, hardware and software. The wider VP environment is an assemblage of these and other objects that shape the qualities of the project.

The interface envelopes that emerge from these encounters can be of different length, be open or closed, may induce anticipation and other responses, are shaped by memory – as experienced in gameplay – form a ‘continuously modulated now’ says Ash. Envelopes are spatio-temporal ‘compositions’ or ‘ecologies of objects’ that create economic and cultural value for makers through what Ash terms the development of ‘envelope power’, a way of maintaining control over one’s environment much as physical and cultural ‘spheres’ are the protective envelopes that allow us to survive while also creating new capacities for action (Sloterdijk, 2011). Interface environments, by their nature, shape ‘localised foldings of space-time’.

For example, Final Fantasy XIII involves the ‘active time battle (ATB) system’ which gauges gameplay and relays ‘damage’ information to the player. The readings ‘make time and space appear narrowed, focused and fast moving’; ‘as the camera zooms in on the damage markers created by player attacks, the resolution of the attack increases, pulling space together’. Or, by pulling the camera back, ‘space and time loosen a little, offering the player a sense of the environment beyond the immediacy of the battle’. This exemplifies Ash’s two-way ‘transduction’ between objects – the process of converting a stimulus or signal from one form to another ‘with some end goal or effect in mind’. A VP interface environment is a complex ‘computationally driven surface’ or interface.

The VP futures methodology

For the first time, Epic Games and ILM collaborated on an open-access VP training initiative, offering structured taught modules, masterclasses and bespoke mentorship from ILM and other experts, to guide the development of the eight participating creative companies. This was complemented by access – at key stages – to state-of-the-art VP facilities and to technical support at EPIC Studios in London and at Future Screens NI at Ulster University, Northern Ireland.

Each company documented its journey using Playbooks, based on a provided logbook template, and short weekly video logs (vlogs) documented the challenges, discoveries, and methodological changes of the individual teams as they developed. The Playbook acted as the framework to help companies pitch projects for inclusion in the final Production Zone, enabling the decision-making team to evaluate their roadmap to delivery of final projects (Programme Notes).

At the beginning of the VP Futures programme each company also undertook a skills self-audit using the VP Skills Matrix, a template outlining VP roles, responsibilities and skills. This self-audit was then shown to VP experts to refine project plans and identify ways of addressing gaps in skills, training and resources. Participants were encouraged to use the Matrix alongside guidance in budgeting, planning, and management. The Matrix highlights the non-linear and ‘front-loaded’ nature of VP production and the wide spectrum of technical, creative, and communicational competencies required.

The VP Skills Mandala (see Figure 2), on which the Matrix is based, is available as a downloadable resource for VP training design and for use in VP skills audits for those entering VP practice (Heath, 2025), and has been used by organisations such as ScreenSkills in the UK. Both the Mandala and Matrix were based on prior ethnographic research carried out for the StoryFutures Academy VP Skills reports (Bennett and Heath, 2021), with 41 semi-structured interviews with VP practitioners over 2 years. During this period the profiles of the participants were periodically reviewed against EDI and other criteria to ensure that the mix of interviewees was as reflective of the industry as possible. Transcripts were analysed using the qualitative data analysis software package MAXQDA, extracting themes inductively from the data and reviewing these among the research team.

Figure 2.

The VP Skills Mandala, second iteration, February 2023. This resource is available to download from Royal Holloway, University of London, Figshare repository: https://doi.org/10.17637/rh.30454544.v

During the interviews participants were shown a Miro board showing early iterations of the VP Skills Mandala, exploring it with the researchers, integrating their feedback and knowledge about roles, workflows and skills the Mandala over time. The Mandala’s circular format was dictated by an adapted version of the EPIC Unreal VP process diagram which was placed at the centre (Kadner, 2019), referencing the production mandalas designed by Alex McDowell (2017, 2019). Around this the various VP departments, roles, and the skills associated with these roles, were gradually built up, converging on the central space to suppo filmmaking and storytelling. The VP Skills Mandala serves as both a conceptual and practical tool for navigating VP’s complexity, and appeared in both the Interim and Final VP Skills reports produced by StoryFutures Academy (Bennett et al., 2023; Bennett and Heath, 2021). As a device, it helps establish a shared frame of reference for a common language, acting as a ‘boundary object’ (Griesemer, 2015) that enables knowledge exchange across communities (Star and Griesemer, 1989). It also distinguishes between technical and communicational skills to prevent the latter from being overshadowed by a focus on VP technologies.

For this paper, the data gathered during the VP Futures were analysed using a similar approach as in the VP skills interviews described above. The materials included the Playbooks, video logs (vlogs), and VP Skills Matrix audits. In addition to this a limited series of follow-up interviews in 2024 revisited selected companies from VP Futures to assess the impact of the programme over the longer-term and discuss the future of VP.

Another aspect of the programme methodology was to pursue ‘integrated VP’ while exploring virtual aesthetics and designing educational programmes (Barnett et al., 2025). In this context educators could act as ‘scholar-informants’ (Caldwell, 2009), serving in an essential role in mediating between learners and industry mentors while contributing to the programme’s research dimension. All companies in the VP Futures training cohort successfully completed the Development Zone as documented in the StoryFutures Academy Final Report (Bennett and Ganz, 2023).

Findings: Three vignettes

Among the eight companies on the programme, three feature in this article: one from Northern Ireland and two from mainland UK. Two of these companies advanced to the final Production Zone – one from Northern Ireland and one from the mainland. The rationale for this selection is that each company represents one of many different types of entry point to VP, three contrasting but representative ‘fractions’ of the creative industries. One company works in film and TV, another in animation and game design, and the third works in immersive experience design and theatre production. Of the other creative companies on the programme these were involved in animation and motion capture, film and TV, immersive exhibition design, extended reality (XR), architectural visualisation and in other areas.

Company A: Moving from traditional filmmaking to VP

Company A is an independent television production company formed in Scotland in 2012 to produce factual and factual entertainment television programmes and formats. They were developing an interest in producing feature documentaries and exploring new ways to bring factual stories vividly to life on screen. The company had no previous experience with VP or real-time technologies.

The biggest challenge for the company was to gain an understanding of the processes and skills required to deliver VP projects. Their aim was to produce sample scenes for a four-part, high-budget scripted TV series. Their project consisted of several scenes exploring the life of important figures in twentieth century surrealist art, demonstrating the impact of VP on storytelling, and using this to pitch to funders and commissioners. A screenwriter was employed on the team during the lead-in to the Development Zone.

The basis of the scenes is an historical encounter between Edward James, patron of the surrealist painter Salvador Dali, and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Dali carries his painting ‘Metamorphosis of Narcissus’ with him to demonstrate how Freud’s theories have shaped his art. In a scene influenced by Dali’s collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock on the film ‘Spellbound’, we enter a surreal inner world via a dream sequence. There, Freud says to Dali, ‘in classic paintings I look for the unconscious, but in your paintings I look for the conscious’.

The company’s application to VP Futures stated their creative goal, linking the availability of digital worlds and the unconscious: ‘we want to immerse ourselves in this surrealist imaginative landscape, and at the same time reveal a key thematic element of the drama’ – through the interaction between the characters and the VP environments (Screenwriter, Week 1, Playbook). ‘Our lack of a need for 100 percent photo accuracy makes our project forgiving of the current shortcomings of the VP shooting [sic]’ thanks in part to scenes featuring soft focus on dreamscapes and Freud’s dimly lit consulting room (Company A, Producer/Director, Week 1, Playbook).

The company created the basis for their cross-domain fluency in VP (Galison’s ‘interactional expertise’) by making early changes to their planned project to focus their requirements more closely onto the technologies available to them within the programme. The team explored how VP could support their vision, particularly in representing optical reflection:

‘There is a large lake in the painting. We want our character to look at his reflection and see the back of his own head, in a knowing reference to a famous painting [by René Magritte]... Is there a way to do this in-camera? Can we use the volume for the water shot?’ (Company A, Producer/Director, Week 1, Playbook).

Technical discontinuities with their previous filmmaking experience were identified early on as a threat to the integrity of the VP envelope they wished to create. In discussion with their Epic Games mentor, ‘we agree that this story is a strong candidate for this kind of filming; most of our conversation centres on how, visually, and using the Volume, we will move from one scene to the other. I had not considered this – Hitchcock uses a simple cross-fade from one scene to the other’ (Company A, Producer/Director, Week 1, Playbook). The team was responding to the experience of working on a VP stage by devising ways to seamlessly move between scenes and immerse their actor in the same look-and-feel presented by the digital environment; this is similar to the observations of Joel Bennett on acting for VP (2020) and also suggests the notion that actors ‘perform with the technology’ Kavakli and Cremona (2022) in a reciprocal back-and-forth relationship with the VP interface environment.

Adjustments were also made in the teams’ approach to screenwriting for their project. Their screenwriter noted that ‘there are so many different ways that we could approach this, that’s the biggest challenge for us’ (Company A, Screenwriter, Week 1, Playbook). Writing in their Playbook on the topic of VP terminology, he looks back on an ‘extraordinary’ day at the EPIC volume in London:

‘I understood barely a fraction of what was spoken about when we looked at the wall... I found myself glazing over as the jargon left me feeling excluded from the conversation while others were in their element! But this was actually very liberating, because it confirmed what I suspected from day 1: that I don’t need to understand all the jargon. The bits I do understand (what a frustum is, all the lighting issues, challenges with rendering, etc.) are enough to help me recognise some of the main limitations of what might be achievable and how I might need to write around those limitations... Will the technology exceed my hopes, or am I imagining more than is currently possible?’ (Company A, Screenwriter, Week 1, Playbook).

Despite the difficulties listed, the screenwriter, possibly the least technically minded of the team, is able to envisage a way of working by ‘writing around those limitations’ – showing how the team was learning how to create and manage the spatio-temporal foldings that VP allows, whether on-set or in-engine. The above Playbook entry is a recognition of the need to develop what Galison calls ‘the capacity to speak in a specific register, an acquisition (by an outsider) of a form of “pidginized out-talk” (2010) and in that way to establish a solid foundation for applied VP knowledge in VP’. It is also a clear illustration of the effects of the ‘bracketing-out’ of unnecessary technical information to leave only the information useful to non-technical VP learners: in this case listed as ‘what a frustum is, all the lighting issues, challenges with rendering’ and so on.

Given the non-technical constitution of the team, there was a search for instructional and demonstrative continuities, touch points between training in VP and learnings gained during prior projects. This was not always straightforward, and after the week 1 skills audit and introduction to the programme, the team’s Producer/Director wonders: ‘Was there a way to brief the team more effectively so they didn’t feel so overwhelmed by technology today?’ (Company A, Producer/Director, Week 1). There was initially a strong sense of the team feeling overwhelmed. After the self-assessment exercise with the VP Skills Matrix it was noted that ‘we have hardly any of the production roles’ apart from the roles of writer and producer, and even there, many VP-specific skills and competencies are highlighted in red, denoting them as missing from the team (Company A, Producer/Director, Week 1, Playbook).

Despite feeling restricted to the early phases of preproduction and production, she notices how their preparations for VP are cyclical and flow in both directions, distorting the traditional sense of production time. She says ‘the part of the mandala we are currently working in is from midday to 12.15. Interestingly, we feel we don’t go in linear time – we traverse back and forth across this metaphorical quarter hour’ (Company A, Producer/Director, Week 1, Playbook). In addition to this the team Producer/Director was managing considerable uncertainty and doubt as to how much time is needed to reach their goals: ‘The scary thing is… there are so many shots! And I don’t have a sense yet of… how many set-ups I can get through in a day in a VR [sic] studio?’ (Company A, Producer/Director, vlog, Week 4).

With humour and self-reflexivity, the team’s Playbook features sections formatted as a screenplay, dramatising the learning process. In doing so, a sense of demonstrative continuity (of argumentation) with their prior experience in writing for screen is brought to the project:

‘Location: INT BFI London: Andrea’s vlog explains feeling slightly overwhelmed, being worried about finding an artist and how the most important next step is the script. She says: “I’m starting to get across the terminology.” That is going to prove to be wrong!’ (Company A, Screenwriter, Week 1, Playbook)

The challenges of changing long-established habits of linear production are again dramatised in week 3:

‘Location: INT ZOOM: “We are taken through the budgeting and scheduling for VP production. Despite having made, produced and commissioned literally hundreds of TV singles and series it looks dauntingly complex. The many roles involved, their deadlines, their interdependencies, and strengths/flaws/foibles are all new and a challenge to understand. What we might expect a studio to come with seems fluid. Is it just the Volume and the space? Or are some technical staff – brain bar for instance – coming with the package?”’ (Company A, Producer/Director, Week 3, Playbook)

The company is here making the shift from well understood forms of project demonstration (budgeting, scheduling, script breakdowns, shot lists) to planning for the non-linear dependencies needed in VP filmmaking, creating technical and demonstrative continuity for themselves.

After completing the VP Futures Development Zone and as they entered the final Production Zone, the team made a self-assessment of their current and future VP production needs, including areas progress was evident, including: how to use Unreal Engine for ‘previs’ and ‘techvis’, employ accurate language and costings, manage the creation of assets and delivery to the wall, and prepare a VP shoot. In certain areas the team felt confident. The team screenwriter reported that he is now much more likely to explore alternative genres and approaches to writing, and has expanded his writing toolkit. The team feels they can now talk with some authority about how to shoot and write for VP technology: ‘the learning curve was phenomenal; we went from being near-total novices to (not quite) experts in six weeks! As a crash course in VP, it was both intensive and highly rewarding’ (Company A, Producer/Director, interview, July 2024); their screenwriter saw the process as going ‘from almost zero knowledge about filming for Virtual Production to a really solid grounding in the terminology, techniques and potential of a VP shoot’ (Company A, Screenwriter, July 2024).

Company B: Moving from games and animation to VP filmmaking

Company B is a microstudio founded in Belfast in Northern Ireland during a university placement year in 2021, operating a business-to-business (B2B) model with arts, education, film, and TV clients, positioning themselves to meet opportunities as specialists serving VP in Northern Ireland working with LED volumes, camera tracking, digital assets, and Unreal Engine for film production.

Their proposed project was a short film, a ‘supernatural romantic tragedy’, where an animated Metahuman statue is photographed within the scene by their actor – a scenario that exemplifies Ash’s notion of an encounter between technical objects and actors, transducing a supernatural interaction from those components.

The scenes were designed to make the best use of the LED volume on offer to the company during the programme, ‘to portray the passage of time with real-time lighting and the live compositing of CGI characters into the shoot’ (Application). In week 1, the company noted in their Playbook a key continuity challenge to address – a significant hurdle in building interdisciplinary capability in VP. This was that the ‘team members were not experienced with live shooting on-set terminology, as they had previously only worked in postproduction’ (Company B, HoD Production/Artist, Week 1, Playbook). To establish themselves in the VP sector and operate effectively within the training-trading zone of VP Futures, the company needed to confront this limitation directly.

The company did so by identifying entry points from where they could build interactional expertise, bringing transferable skills and experience from previous experience working in animation across into VP – as Galison says, completing a shared ‘move’ common to both disciplines, creating the conditions for exchange in the VP training-trading zone. For example, following the programme’s online session on ‘Camera Movement’, creative directorial opportunities for the project emerged:

‘I’m already starting to see applications, we’re an animation studio, there’s nothing stopping us bringing some animations into Unreal and using VCam to place my final shots and get some camera shake going on’ (Company B, HoD Technical, vlog, Week 3).

This is an example of a shared move (or operation) that works in both animation, games and VP. Further evidence of internalisation, this time of the principles of virtual lighting and ‘practical’ (physical) lighting for VP, is found in week 4 of the programme during the testing of technical configurations for ICVFX (In-Camera Visual Effects) in the VP volume. The Playbook recites their ‘top learning’ for that week, using mentor-informed VP terminology:

‘The brightness of the walls can be dimmed to dial in the exposure on the camera. While the background will be illuminating the actor with wrap lighting, you don’t want to blow out the foreground with too intense a backlight’. (Company B, Playbook).

This illustrates how documentation took shape in the Playbook, which the team later spoke about as a primary source of demonstrative continuity, or argumentation specific to VP – capturing terminology, principles, and production heuristics. The Playbook, they said, ‘will be invaluable as we continue to grow as a company and onboard new staff into our virtual production pipelines’ (Company B, HoD Technical, interview, July 2024). The Playbook notes guidance given by mentors that in the Virtual Art Department (VAD) that the ‘deliverable is decisions not assets, avoid overbuilding’. The Playbook captures the carefulness the company now took to not ‘over-determine’ their VP interface environments, thus circumventing potential problems.

In terms of pedagogical continuity (of training) the company acknowledged that learning about VP was going to be a perpetual process: ‘For us, the training is never done; there’s never going to be a point for us with VP where we know everything’ (Company B, HoD Production/Artist, Week 5, Playbook). Artificial intelligence is one such area within VP, there is a continual flow of new information and techniques to process, learning curve is significant. The HoD Production/Artist, speaking sometime after the VP Futures programme, saw a future opportunity for AI to level the playing field, making it easier small creative companies to compete with the larger players:

‘Yes, you need pockets of people who are specialised in the AI skill set... but if you imagine a small company that doesn’t have all those skills, if they’re able to generate their prompt through no-code systems, that might open up real-time as a possibility for their productions’ (Company B, HoD Production/Artist, interview, July 2024).

Although AI was not yet widely used during the VP Futures programme (June 2022), at the time of interview in 2024, however, she foresaw that ‘we are going to be integrating a lot more AI into rendering’, and yet at the same time felt that the pace of change made it very difficult predict where this would lead for VP in the future: ‘technology is developing so quickly now that looking at 2030 is like looking into the year 3000!’ (Company B, HoD Production/Artist, interview, July 2024). Recent research on the uptake of generative AI in the screen and live performance industries suggests that its growth in the games sector, certainly by the end of 2022, is indicative of an expanding role for AI within the screen industries, including VP, acknowledging that AI innovation in filmmaking is developing across several interconnected sectors simultaneously (Huang, 2025).

The value of democratised access to documentation is seen in the Playbook and the Notion platform, where, for example, notes were made on digital character pipelines (Figure 3), ‘so that everybody has the same level of knowledge and access’ to the insights gained from the training opportunity (Company B, HoD Technical, vlog, Week 2). This demonstrative continuity was also provided by the team’s 3D Artist (who also worked on technical troubleshooting, making storyboards, and as a stand-in), who notes that ‘I did a lot of diagrams as well, just to break everything down into more visual forms’ (Company B, 3D Artist, vlog, Week 5). The company ethos highlighted the importance of shared knowledge, close teamwork, VP democratisation, and demonstrative continuity, an essential part of this ethos. Their Playbook was therefore ‘a document that outlines the on-set protocol and is a blueprint for future productions and crew hires’ (Company B, Playbook).

Figure 3.

Company B, notes on ‘Metahumans Adaptation’, a workflow for digital humans in Unreal (Metahumans) from their Playbook. This shows the reasoning behind the workflow, and provides technical and demonstrative continuity, or continuity of VP argumentation.

The company also engaged in collaborative worldbuilding within the VP environment. For trainees, taught theoretical content is directly complemented by the ability to interactively explore the assets built for VP filmmaking (Kruse and Bennett, 2015), and for Company B’s collaborative worldbuilding this is especially true. The team’s HoD Production/Artist spoke about how virtual environments are developed by multiple contributors, exploring the interface environment of VP, testing different set-ups for encounters between objects. This collaborative mode encouraged teamwork and built technical continuity from their earlier animation projects: ‘We’re in Unreal Engine, we’re multi-usered in; I’d be here, somebody would be upstairs [in the environment], but we’re all in the same world, working together’ – while leveraging their environment creation skills from previous game design experience (Company B, HoD Production/Artist, interview, July 2024).

The company successfully internalised VP filmmaking principles, helping to create the conditions for exchange in the VP trading zone. Retrospective evidence for this can be seen in the post VP Futures interview – where a comparison was made between games environment design for audiences to consume at a later stage and the more interactive and collaborative approach to worldbuilding carried out during VP filmmaking preproduction. This might be described as the simultaneous world-construction and user-testing of that world:

‘Traditionally, you have an environment artist who gets given all the assets made by other people, and they go in and do everything, but where they tend to gravitate in the 3D space is different from where other people gravitate to. And in games, that’s really important, because you need to cover all your bases, have control over where people typically go. Multi-user allows all the team to get hands-on... [which is] a weird roundabout way of saying that we’re using that idea that’s typically used for audiences actually [with]in [the] production [process while we are working] in the [VP] space’ (Company B, HoD Production/Artist, interview, July 2024).

A key difference between designing environments for games and designing digital environments for VP is that in games a navigation mesh is required, as the HoD Production/Artist describes above, determining where the players may or may not go. For this company at least, the role of a navigation layer is replaced in VP by the hands-on testing of an environment by the team, an important way of seeing how these technical objects may or may not be interacting with one another, allowing them to identify emergent properties of the VP interface environment that will lead the project in the right direction.

The company encountered three major challenges, each documented in their Playbook. In each of these there was an emergent but undesirable encounter between objects in the VP interface environment that potentially interferes with the storyworld requiring rewriting or revision of plans.

In the first, the Playbook records an insight gained from mentorship provided by Ian Milham, a highly experienced VP Supervisor working at ILM. Milham cautioned ‘Potential Eyeline Issues’ in their plans, where the arrangement of objects in their VP interface environment means that an actor might naturally look at the surface of the screen instead of engaging with the spatial logic of the virtual world, resulting in mismatched sightlines. They might then appear to be looking at a different part of virtual space compared to what the camera is seeing, as shown in the Playbook diagram made by the company’s 3D Artist to record this insight (Figure 4). An actor will naturally look at an object depicted on the plane of the LED screen, but since the object sits within a 3D scene represented ‘behind’ the screen, so it will be further away from the actor than the physical screen will be. Mentors urged the team to take account of this when directing actors on-set. The challenge here is in controlling the parameters of the illusion provided to the camera – in the language of the interface envelope a new layer must be added to the VP interface environment to accommodate the difference between actual and virtual sightlines, what might be called an ‘actor POV’ mesh. This is retained as a set of instructions for actors to adjust their gazes according to their estimate of camera sightline into the depicted scene, rather than to simply take what they can see on the screen at face value. As Ash might put it, the storyworld has to be maintained by a localised folding of space and time, managing how visual information reaches the camera.

Figure 4.

Company B, schematic showing ‘Eyeline issues’ for artists on set in relation to the perceived spatial position of objects represented on LED screens, from Playbook, Week 5.

A second challenge was highlighted in the Playbook which records a ‘thought experiment’ outlined by Milham to illustrate the potential focus problems for the camera related to water reflections within their VP interface environment:

‘Take this scenario, in which a mobile LED door is suspended [horizontally] above physical water. Since the reflection appears the same distance from the water as it originates from the LED volume, the camera can either focus on the water, or the reflection, not both. This situation would also apply to mirrors or other reflective surfaces’ (Company B, HoD Technical, Playbook, Week 5).

This scenario was again documented by the 3D artist as a diagram for the Playbook (Figure 5), and concerns only the capture of light by the camera, rather than the sightlines of actors in relation to the camera and the digital scene. Nevertheless, many of the same considerations about the VP interface environment apply to both scenarios – in both cases the company reframed their response to the limitations of VP in the Virtual Art Department (VAD). The team also flagged the risk of generating ‘infinity reflections’ between virtual and physical surfaces – another example of unforeseen emergent properties that might undermine visual coherence and derail the filmmakers’ illusion.

Figure 5.

Company B, schematic showing the potential issue of ‘Infinity reflection between physical and virtual surfaces’ in VP. A diagram produced by the company in Week five for their Playbook, illustrating training insights gained from working with ILM mentor Ian Milham.

In the lead-up to the first round of testing on the volume, the team noted that ‘we were apprehensive about… the character taking a photo of the statue… Can we get our talent to take a photo live on-camera of the subject being portrayed on the LED Walls?’ The testing of this took place after an online training session on ‘Digital Character Workflow’, an entirely new skills area for them: ‘We have never used Metahumans before, or built an entire environment out of Quixel assets’ (Company B, HoD Technical, vlog, Week 2). The objective was for the actor to be captured while using their mobile phone to take a photograph of a digital human character who exists only within the digital scene. Insurmountable issues with screen refresh rates prevented this from being achieved within the time allotted, and the company ultimately addressed this issue in postproduction, where they knew they had the skills to deal with this emergent but undesirable property of their VP interface environment. None of these challenges prevented the company from delivering a successful pitch for the Production Zone and their final project.

Company C: Moving from immersive production and theatre to VP filmmaking

Company C is a London-based creative company that combines contemporary theatre and experimental immersive production design. Recently relaunched at the time of the programme, they are a company with ‘a proven track record in subsidised theatre, and a future in commercial transmedia productions exploring the creative application of VP and XR technologies’ (Company C, Application).

The proposal of company C was to create an innovative live multi-camera stage production, using VP to dramatise a semi-autobiographical ‘one-woman live stage show with four performer-camera operators’, and the aim of the project was to explore the notion of ‘disability as superpower using live motion capture and live virtual production techniques onstage’ (Company C, Application). The video element was to be created in Unreal Engine and presented through the LED volume, with several on-stage camera operators visible within the performance. The company proposed to make a proof-of-concept sizzle reel during VP Futures, for a production that will be ‘experienced live in an auditorium or digitally after the event through a 360 VR recording’ (Company C, Project Outline). The sizzle reel would provide a demonstrative continuity between the new technologies of VP new to the company and its customary ways of pitching projects and reaching audiences.

A stated strategic ‘stretch goal’ for the company was to create a template for reduced-risk experimentation with VP and related technologies in the theatre sector, fulfilling a need for a ‘physical space for testing distribution mechanisms for live performance’ (Company C, Director/Producer, interview, July 2024). For this company, the future of VP is viewed through the prism of live performance; ‘people will want to be able to experience liveness in virtual and other mixed realities, and it just seems a natural step from where gaming already is with group play… people will drive towards that sort of communal experience’ (Company C, Director/Producer, interview, July 2024).

In common with the work of Katie Mitchell in live cinema (where performers and sets are filmed live with the audience able to view both the end result and the making of this) the company wished to use the medium to ‘declare the process of construction’ while at the same time showing the resulting construction; and also to exercise appropriate control over how the ‘interiority’ of the narrative is perceived by the audience (Mitchell, 2015). As with the other companies referred to here, a degree of creative and technical risk was envisaged in the proposed project, although in this case there are added dimensions of complexity to factor into the planning of the project – the need to create an assemblage of VP technologies able to accommodate continuous live performance and live capture, which some may describe as a radical extension or ‘hack’ of a conventional VP interface environment. In the live performance envisaged, ‘the Unreal Engine version of events plays out on an LED wall behind the main protagonist, revealing an alternative take on reality’ (Company C, Project outline). With a greater number of elements to play with there are consequently a greater number of ways that the company could reap emergent creative rewards.

Company C’s entry point to VP was via their native storytelling experience and skills in creative R&D, which they described as a key strength of the team, as was indicated in their skills self-assessment at the start of the programme. Despite being able to access a number of demonstrative and educational continuities with their earlier work (familiarity with the Unity game engine and with producing pitch materials, for instance), this new VP learning curve created new demands in these same areas. ‘As a small unfunded theatre company in the process of relaunching, we don’t yet wield the production power, or have a full range of skills and staff to create this sizzle reel’ (Company C, Application).

Company C’s VP Skills Matrix, completed at the start of the programme, shows a number of red areas where skills were lacking and where technical continuity was missing, for example: sourcing VP skills, understanding hidden VP costs, Unreal Sequencer, digital storyboards, and production pipeline integration (Figure 6); in other areas light cream-coloured regions denote skills that might be transferred from the Unity game engine into the Unreal game engine, for example: virtual set dressing, 3d modelling and rendering into Unreal. At the top of the Matrix provided to them by VP Futures the company added their own colour scheme:

‘We want to develop this skill within the team [red]

We want to bring a new person with [this] skill into the team [orange]

We have this skill in Unity, but not in Unreal [light yellow]

We already have this skill [light green]

We’ve added this skill [purple]’

(Company C, VP Skills Matrix, 2022).

Figure 6.

Company C’s VP Skills Matrix, detail. Completed at the start of the programme. At top centre the Matrix Key explains the light blue background (creative and communicational skills) and the yellow background (technical skills). The company have added a first revision of the colour code above this (please see main text for a description).

The version of the Matrix completed at the end of the programme, however, shows a completely revised colour code that re-categorises skills into three types, with many more now classed as fields where the team now has ‘Practical knowledge’ (green), while others (especially in the more technical areas) are now described as those where the company has ‘Strong theoretical knowledge’ (orange) (Figure 7). Some other domains are identified as those where new skills need to be brought into the team (purple), in roles such as Director of Cinematography, Colour Technical Artist, and DIT; they have also added new roles, for a MoCap Director and MoCap Technician and a new set of specialist skills for Live Vision Mixing. The sections changed to orange by the team correspond to areas where some degree of cross-functional knowledge of VP has been achieved since joining the programme. Meanwhile, the sections adjusted to green appear to indicate where full contributory expertise had now been exercised, or was close to being so, in digital storyboarding, virtual set dressing, and workflow integration. For this company, the value of the training delivered by VP Futures lay in ‘de-risked access to equipment, time, and expertise, artist expertise just as much as tech’ (Company C, Director/Producer, interview, July 2024). ‘We are responding to the quality of the opportunity’ said the Director/Producer, by asking questions of VP Futures trainers and industry mentors ‘at the bleeding edge’ of what is possible (Company C, Director/Producer, vlog, Week 6). In addition, the company investigated live performance capture and performer-camera operator roles, the VP Futures team organised customised motion capture training sessions for Company C, and for others on the programme to enhance research and development.

Figure 7.

Company C’s VP Skills Matrix, detail. Completed at the end of the programme. At top centre the team have added a revised colour code, where skills are identified as having ‘Practical knowledge’ of an area (green), ‘Strong theoretical knowledge’ (orange), or plan to ‘Bring this into the team’ (purple).

Continuity of systems is needed for establishing translational skills, and a series of video logs created for VP Futures illustrate the aspirations of the team’s two Artist/Creative Technologists, aiming to translate their expertise from immersive experience design into VP. The videos provide a vivid account of what it is like to operate under conditions of technical uncertainty, as a result of working with new technology and the pressing need to acquire new skills and knowledge to operate it. At a very early stage and before the first LED volume tests of their project were made, one of the Artist/Creative Technologists was asked about the progress already made in understanding VP techniques, and joked:

‘We are transitioning from Unity to Unreal, and the good news is, they’re exactly the same! So we are going through that process of migrating knowledge from one platform to another, and hopefully that process is going to be pretty slick!’ (Company C, Artist/Creative Technologist, vlog, Week 1).

While this was a deliberately provocative and humorous statement made by a creative technologist who was aware of the differences as well as the overlaps between the two tools, the migration of this expertise was to be tested during initial trials of their environments on a VP volume, as hypothetical or actual scenarios for their project:

‘For me, today is all about frame rates, we have got it running at 60 fps on our own machine, but what does that mean here, and what happens when we drag 5 Metahumans in, and what happens if we add 15 lights on a rotating rotunda, what happens if we make our neon light flash or flicker? What’s the frame rate? That’s what I want to know’ (Company C, Artist/Creative Technologist, vlog, Week 3).

By week 8 of the programme the challenges had narrowed to the question of how best to portray a scene set in a tunnel. By now, the team had decided to alter the narrative, changing the bicycle accident in the story to a motorcycle accident. This decision had two benefits; it introduced ‘amazing reflective surfaces’ on the motorcycle, and the greater speed of the accident brought about ‘a massive increase in jeopardy’ for the main character. By this stage, the team had established a reasonable degree of technical continuity allowing them to function in the VP interface environment. These examples from the documentation of their progress shows how the team responded to the de-risked environment of the programme, designed to encourage the acquisition of new skills and experimentation via R&D on a working VP project. The team had implemented the type of radical ‘instinctive decision making’ noticed by Silva Jasaui et al. (2024) in VP training settings, showing their increasing confidence and expertise. Their Playbook records how the tunnel scene is developed by bringing the actor into proximity with a range of technical objects (the camera frustum, camera movement, practical and virtual lighting). This is an example of transduction in an interface environment, according to Ash, with the conversion of these elements into the perception of an actor immersed in a dynamic virtual scene. This is an emergent (and desired) effect of the VP interface environment, as if the actor is being bathed ‘in the same light as the elements represented in the visual environment that surrounds them’ (Bennett, 2020):

‘We were unable to bake the tunnel scene because there’s an issue... [we can] see how the frame rate plays out on that, but also we want to animate the frustum, moving down the tunnel, and see how that looks, maybe get someone in there and see the reflections on their face, maybe someone wearing glasses’ (Company C, Artist/Creative Technologist, Week 8).

While working within the constraints of VP the team explored the key story themes and the interiority of its central character. A relationship soon emerged between the central themes of their narrative and the game engine and motion capture technologies being employed to realise the story. In a short vlog the Director/Producer remarks on what she calls a ‘point of correlation’ between the story and motion capture technology:

‘What is on the surface of a game engine is completely dictated by what is underneath the surface, which might seem like an obvious thing to say, but what I’m getting at is... this seems pretty similar (to me) to how we might talk about an invisible disability; on the surface, you might present as an able-bodied person, but underneath there are differences in the programming which means that that person might experience glitches or poor performance issues’ (Company C, Director/Producer, vlog, Week 4).

These correspondence points were first suggested to the team Director/Producer by the continuing motion capture ‘technical hitches’ experienced by the team:

‘Where an issue arises in motion capture data, the system tries to fill the gaps using a preordained template, a “normal skeleton,” to predict what is there, [however] the skeleton and ligament system of our character isn’t standard at all’ (Company C, Director/Producer, vlog, Week 5).

This was a major realisation, an insight into how their VP interface environment might be developed and where this might lead for them as a team creatively. Boutellier and Raptis (2023) describe the ‘almost visceral reaction’ experienced by VP trainees when seeing their assets and story writ large ‘in the volume’ of a VP interface environment for the first time. Company C’s VP project is a semi-autobiographical story that concerns a bodily disability, and so there may be an embodied component to the recognition of the connection between character development and technical systems, one that requires a response from the team in both the VAD and in screenwriting. The trajectory of company C, from theatre and immersive production design towards interactional expertise in VP, shows that discovering intriguing ‘correlation points’ early on is an important means of anchoring from a home discipline into VP.

Conclusion

This exploratory application of Galison's and Ash's concepts to VP Futures is a first step to a wider reappraisal of the literature on VP, and there are several other theoretical lenses that may be brought to this domain in future work, from critical approaches to HCI and Science and Technology Studies for example. Meanwhile, this paper has argued that to better understand the VP training scenario for any given team, a two-stage approach can be taken. This makes use of two explanatory layers that are linked but do different work. The first layer establishes how teams are disposed in terms of their home disciplines, how trainees carry their existing skills and experience over into VP (and trade on that with other disciplines), how they anchor themselves into a new process using touchpoints, continuities between familiar and unfamiliar processes, how this new expertise is acquired and the ways they interact with experts. This is where the trading zone framework is helpful.

The second layer of explanation, meshed with the first, is to establish what VP filmmaking looks like from the inside once training begins to produce tangible outcomes. This identifies how a particular VP interface environment has been crafted (transduced), how to manage and then leverage highly interactive VP environments (with its spatio-temporal foldings) towards storytelling ends. It also addresses how, in the training context, anchor points (continuities with previous practice) have fed into a VP training shoot, as documented by the companies in their Playbooks. As the literature has shown, and as the case study data presented here also indicates, working with VP technologies to deliver narratives can be an immersive and embodied experience for those both on and off set. We have seen how the VP interface environment, with its origins in real-time technologies and game design, supports collaborative worldbuilding across teams – as they work with digital objects reflections, sightlines for the performances of actors, the ability to ‘write around’ the limitations of the technology and stretch the boundaries of VP. This is where the interface envelope framework is helpful.

Bringing the two interpretive layers into one view of VP may provide a holistic approach to analysing data from VP training programmes, in addition to the data derived from skills audits and mapping. The notion of a composition of technical and other objects help us understand what it is like to craft a VP interface environment, while the concepts of trading zones and inter-language collaboration help us identify the conditions needed to create an interface environment in the first instance, from a disparate set of technical and other objects. Trading zones offer a way of describing the temporary shared spaces of VP training, and a framework for investigating the use of language and shared objects in these environments, bridging differences in understanding across disciplines. The notion of an interface environment gives us a way of talking about the qualities of these environments, especially in the way that they are constructed by trainees from a variety of technical and other objects with desired or unplanned consequences. The combination of these two ways of interrogating data from training initiatives can be fed into the design of new VP educational programmes, acknowledging how VP trainees must encounter VP, as a complex enveloping assemblage of different types of object that must be shaped according to aims and goals.

A VP training project, considered as an interface environment, encompasses, encloses, protects and surrounds filmmakers and filmmaking processes, for a period at least, since such environments are inevitably temporary. The VP Futures Playbooks acted like production diaries, providing a record of how VP environments are developed by trainees. One area that can be further developed is how individual programmes can build towards a common language for VP trainees using an informal or formal ontology of VP terms. Another area to be further developed is what might be described as the gamification of filmmaking – how best to leverage the sense of immersion gained from learning in a VP setting, building upon the observations in the literature and here that VP is phenomenologically different from traditional filmmaking due to the interactivity and dynamism of real-time virtual environments.

The VP Futures programme points to a significant range of technical, managerial, and communicational skills and competencies acquired by all of the creative companies who attended (Bennett et al., 2023), giving them a foothold in VP from where they have progressed to run their own VP projects. The programme stated its ethos as ‘We will bridge the gaps’ – it did so by offering comprehensive, mentored, modular and bespoke training to companies rather than to individuals, addressing skills gaps for teams as they arose and, importantly, doing so according to a nuanced understanding of the ‘fractions’ of the industry they represent. The programme listened attentively to companies, much as Galison suggests is the basis for any successful trading zone. VP Futures provided a de-risked environment for immersing teams in live VP projects, in which they could design their own VP interface environments, experience them working, and through intensive practice begin to develop their own trading zone fluency in VP. These findings have direct implications for VP curriculum design and funding strategy: future training initiatives should integrate both technical and creative domains, while resourcing iterative, practice-based learning. The dual-layer framework of trading zones and interface environments offers a transferable model for interdisciplinary skills development, and could inform similar programmes across screen, design, and immersive media sectors.