UK-China Research and Innovation Collaboration in Cloud based Virtual Film Production

As the fourth largest film market worldwide, UK films (25% of global box office revenues) has become an essential driver of economic growth and a key cultural export. The Chinese box office (20bn CNY Box office Revenue) has now overtaken North America as the largest film market in the world. Although there is a large drop on the revenue due to Covid-19, forecasts indicate that in post-pandemic ages the movie market will recover at a fast pace due to the development of new creative technology, such as the Cloud based Virtual Film Production, where different teams of production practice could be carried out simultaneously through cloud based remote collaboration and practitioners work in and interact directly with a virtual set. Virtual Production (VP) reduces the need to move crews and equipment to location and enables remote working in VR, reducing Covid-19 risks, the environmental footprint, and production costs. The global Virtual Production Market size is expected to reach £2.2b by 2026, rising at a rate of 14.3%. The industry of both countries has attracted enormous investment in this direction. Some of the successful examples being DNeg (UK) and Mirror Pictures (China). Since 2019, Mirror Pictures in Shanghai has developed a Cloud platform for Virtual Production including state-of-the-art professional equipment and cloud computing resources. A similar film production platform was developed by our partner in UK - DNEG, which however focus more on virtual production pipeline development, integrating UK's world leading film production techniques into the new system framework. Interestingly, businesses in this sector from UK and China have taken weight in two different directions. UK companies have more focus on virtual production, whereas Chinese counterparts have put more efforts on cloud system development, pointing to important bases for complements and collaboration between both.

As this technology is only emerging and developing, there are undoubtedly a lot of challenges and difficulties from various perspectives, e.g. technical issues, standardisation of pipeline, intellectual property, data security, cultural impact, policy development, etc. Attracted by this promising opportunity, this project seeks to address the above-mentioned challenges to bring academic researchers, system developers, film production practitioners, market researchers from both countries together to apply our complementary expertise to explore this next-generation film production technology, identify the challenges and develop strategic plans for solutions. This project will match one specific theme of this AHRC call: Sector Mapping, which is to offer market intelligence and "horizon scanning" for the sector in the UK and China in terms of RD&I. This project aims to investigate the key market forces and industry dynamics shaping the evolution of the film production industry in the UK and China. The market research will analysis the difference and intersection between the two markets, identify the policy trends and barriers to overcome, investigate the way for businesses of both countries to collaborate to maximise the market potentials, develop a new guidance and strategy for potential collaboration on research and innovation. The project will produce a report for AHRC outlining recommendations for UK-China collaboration, informing emerging UKRI's strategy.

This project team includes Higher Education Institutions, independent research organisation and industry companies from both UK and China. The UK team include researchers from the National Centre for Computer Animation (Bournemouth University, Project lead), University of Durham (UK market research) and industry lead DNEG. The China side includes researchers from Shanghai Jiaotong University (China market research), Shanghai Film Academy (film production), Shanghai Institute for Advanced Study of Zhejiang University (Artificial Intelligence) and Mirror Pictures (China industry Lead).