Traditional pre-production is built around a rectangle: boards, shot lists, lens choices, overheads. Immersive pre-production has to answer questions no storyboard can — How close is too close? Where does the seam fall? What does this staging feel like when you're standing inside it? The unknowns are physical, and the only honest way to answer a physical question is to test it.
That's why on our productions, experimentation isn't something that happens if there's time left over. It's a scheduled phase with its own days on the calendar — because the cheapest mistakes you will ever make on an immersive project are the ones you make in prep.
Before anything is scheduled or built, we sit down with the director, DP, and creative leads, and work scene by scene: what is this moment for, and how does that intent stage in a world without a frame? A planned close-up becomes a proximity move. Coverage becomes choreography. It's in these sessions that a traditional script becomes an immersive one — and where everyone leaves speaking the same language.
Immersive staging decisions shouldn't be made on a laptop screen, because a laptop screen will lie to you about scale, distance, and intimacy. We previsualize key scenes in headset, so the director can stand inside the blocking before a single truck is loaded. Ten minutes of in-headset previz brings to light hidden challenges before we arrive on set.
Anything the project is betting on — an unusual camera position, a stunt, a lighting concept, a new piece of gear — gets tested first. A prototype day costs a fraction of a production day and converts "we think this works" into "we watched it work." The footage also gives editorial and post an early look at what's coming, which pays off.
A location scout for an immersive shoot isn't about finding the pretty angle — there are no angles; the camera sees everything. We scout with the actual rig, checking sightlines in every direction, where shadows may fall with the time of day, how close the action can get, and where the crew will disappear to. The location either works in the sphere or it doesn't, and you want to know before you commit.
The distribution becomes a critical decision point. What is the maximum playback resolution and framerate? Does our platform support interactivity? With limited budget, where are we going to see the greatest return? The immersive market will throw enormous numbers at you — "16K!", "12K!" — and most of them are marketing. The number that actually matters is pixels per degree: how much real detail lands in each eye once that giant image is wrapped around the viewer. After that, three things decide whether a camera serves the story — framerate (a comfort requirement in a headset, not a stylistic flourish), color latitude (immersive scenes routinely carry their own bright practicals and deep shadows in a single frame), and compression (how gracefully the image survives on the headset it will actually play on). We translate the pros and cons of ever shifting technological sands into the one thing that matters: bringing the story to life.
The right tool also changes with the story. A single dual-fisheye body — the kind of rig behind our Canon 180 VR work — is ideal for intimate, nimble storytelling, while a high-end multi-camera rig earns its weight on a show like SNL 50th Anniversary Special where being fully immersed in the environment is driving the creative. And sometimes the best vantage point is one no person could ever occupy: on David Blaine's Ascension the camera rose into the sky alongside him and we wanted to view it in full 360°.
Clients sometimes ask why our pre-production phase looks bigger than they expected. The answer is that in immersive, prep is production insurance. Because we plan, test, and translate up front — and because pitch, production, and post all live under one roof — the questions that derail immersive shoots get answered weeks early, by the same team that will be standing on set. The result is the thing every producer actually wants: a shoot day with no surprises.
