Mid-Week Intermission Friend Edition: Justin Kirchhoff from Co-Production House
POSTED ON MAY 17, 2021 BY LONG
What happens when the show can’t go on? You create a virtual production, of course! This Mid-Week Intermission comes from friend Justin Kirchhoff who’s changing the virtual game as Co-Founder & CEO of Co-Production House. He and his team have been hard at work with the Heller Awards for Young Artists, making sure the show really can go on with their LED volume technology. Don’t know what that is? Read on and find out!
Hi there, I’m Justin Kirchhoff
Co-Founder & CEO of Co-Production House, a virtual production studio with Austin’s first LED volume technology.
The team at CPH includes my business partners, Kristina Smith (Co-Founder and President) and Keller Davis (Co-Owner), our Community Manager Alava Sim, and Kyle Kirchhoff, who rounds out the technical side of our team while also managing our studio. We are excited to be leading Austin’s film, commercial, and business markets into the world of virtual production and love the chance of explaining exactly what it is that we do.
We often get asked, “What is virtual production? What is a LED volume?” Our virtual production capabilities include producing media “virtually,” within the confines of a digital program, and projecting digital environments in a real physical world using our LED volume. An LED volume is quite literally a digital backdrop, not far off from how movies from the 1920s-1960s often used rear projection to showcase actors driving in a car, moving on a train, or even on the 100th floor of a skyscraper.
When the Long Center had announced they wouldn’t be hosting shows in Dell Hall just yet, Ginger Morris of the Heller Awards for Young Artists immediately came to us and asked what we were capable of in order to showcase these young performers doing what they do best. We quickly started putting the pieces together over the course of two and a half weeks, finding digital environments to help sell the idea these young performers were in location that could otherwise be difficult or expensive to produce.
We integrated our VOLUME stage, which includes a 20’x10′ LED wall, consisting of multiple panels, immersing the talent in the virtual environment. With the VOLUME you can produce content all over the world and more, in a single day. The HAYAs asked for over 25 environments in 4 production days, which is unheard of for a film production shoot. Normally, you would have to move your entire cast and crew to each location, which costs a lot of time and money, where the advantage of using our LED Volume allowed us to change locations in a few clicks of a button. It allowed us to focus on performances rather than the disturbances that come with shooting in uncontrolled locations.
The HAYA project was a fantastic experience for our team and also for the young performers. They were excited to be there, immersed in the world their characters lived in. There is always a tremendous payoff when a production is over. We saw the kids get so excited when they looked at our studio monitor. They instantly realized that the digital world behind them truly helped motivate their characters’ actions.
We were incredibly lucky to take part in this year’s Heller Awards for Young Artists. The opportunity to pull off this production in such a short amount of time really set in stone the capabilities of virtual production here at CPH.
We created CPH as a place where professionals can work and grow their businesses through collaboration with the added benefits of creative support, business development, and networking events designed to improve the growth of the creative film and media professionals in Austin, Texas.
We host monthly creative events, which include music from a local band or musician, an artist that showcases the work they’ve been producing, and a learning moment where we show a demonstration of virtual production practices in an everyday production environment.
We take each production that uses our services and provide them the best experience available. Teaming up with the HAYAs has been a grand experience, and we are looking forward to tuning into the livestream of the Awards on May 23rd. See you all then!
Sincerely,
Justin Kirchhoff
Co-Founder/CEO of Co-Production House
Countdown to the 8th Annual Heller Awards for Young Artists with us, streaming on YouTube Sunday night, May 23rd, at 7:30pm. This is one for the books, folks!
