For many years, a highlight of the winter semester for Sheridan’s Advanced TV & Film (ATVF) program has been our visits to Sheridan’s SIRT Centre at Pinewood Studios. This impressive facility was founded by John Helliker, who previously taught Directing and Previsualization in the ATVF program. SIRT has several areas of focus including virtual production, virtual reality, and digital cinema. The team at SIRT supports the larger creative community at Sheridan and across Toronto, but we in ATVF feel a special connection to the facility. This is partly due to Spencer Idenouye, SIRT’s Virtual Production Lead, who is a one of the rare talented individuals who is a graduate of both Sheridan’s Advanced TV & Film program and Sheridan’s Visual Effects program. For the last two years, Spencer has been hosting our visit to SIRT.
This year the ATVF students were again able to experience the benefits of using an advanced motion capture system for previsualization. Teams of students worked as actors, directors, and camera operators under the supervision of the SIRT staff. As an amazing bonus, the students were then also able to experience playback of the scene using a virtual reality integration. The visit concluded with a hint of the future of previsualization via a demonstration of SIRT’s custom ‘Holo Previs’ app for the Microsoft Hololens.
