China: the world’s largest virtual studio finds home in Tianjin Eco-city

Comcast- and GE-owned NBCUniversal is confirmed to build the world’s largest virtual studio in the National Animation Industry Park of Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city, located 95 miles east of Beijing. Phase one of the construction will complete in April 2013, when Bruce Lee’s unfinished film The Silent Flute will be restored and produced at the facility.

NBCUniversal opened its own first virtual stage, the 6,800-sq-ft Universal Virtual Stage 1 (UVS1), with the help from Zoic Studios in December 2010. It was considered a necessary move by the Hollywood giant to transition into advanced virtual digital production.

UVS1 costs $4.5 m to build and install. It contrasts sharply with the large sum of $200 m that NBCUniversal spent in reconstructing the damaged movie sets at Universal Studios in California caused by a big fire in 2008. No longer would filmmakers need to fly their cast and crew all over the world for location shooting, neither would they need to construct large and expensive sets. The virtual stage can handle complex digital production with unprecedented control over the set. It eliminates the boundary between pre-production visualization and post-production by allowing both to happen at the same time on a computer screen.

In February 2012, a delegation from the Tianjin government visited Hollywood and persuaded several studios to set up camp in its low-carbon futuristic eco-city. NBCUniversal was on the officials’ list too as a potential investor for a theme park there.

While that did not work, NBCUniversal agreed on something else. It signed a deal with the Tianjin-based film company Mei Hao He Shan Film on Oct. 16, 2012 to build the world’s largest virtual studio inside the National Animation Industry Park. Mei Hao He Shan Film has made an initial investment of $19.99 m for the project. The virtual studio will occupy 71,041 square feet of land, more than 10 times the size of UVS1. Six more virtual stages covering a total area of 32.95 acres will be built in the phase-two construction too.

For China, the benefits of such a virtual studio complex is more than obvious, given its 12^th five-year plan (2011-2015) to develop the domestic animation industry. It will equip Chinese animators and filmmakers alike with state-of-the-art technologies, so that they can make cultural products that meet Hollywood standards, while China counts on them to boost its soft power abroad.

The American partner, on the other hand, may benefit from a strengthened relationship with China for a bigger market share. The money could also be used for further research and development in cutting-edge virtual production technologies, at a time when money is hard to come by within Hollywood.