StageCraft

StageCraft
Information
Type	Virtual production platform
Industry	Film and television production
Developer	Industrial Light & Magic
Release Date	2018
Website	https://www.ilm.com/stagecraft/

StageCraft (marketed as ILM StageCraft) is the virtual production platform of the visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). ILM describes it as "an end-to-end solution supporting all aspects of virtual production", covering LED volumes, performance capture and facial capture. A core component is the LED volume: a stage enclosed by LED video walls and a ceiling that show real-time rendered environments, redrawn from the tracked position of the film camera so that the background shows correct parallax and lights the actors and practical sets.

ILM developed the first StageCraft volume in 2018 for the first season of the Disney+ series The Mandalorian, and said in February 2020 that more than 50 percent of that season had been filmed with the method. The first season used Epic Games' Unreal Engine for real-time rendering; from the second season ILM used its own real-time renderer, Helios, as part of what it calls StageCraft 2.0. StageCraft received a 74th Engineering, Science and Technology Emmy Award in 2022.

StageCraft is connected to virtual reality at the planning stage. On The Mandalorian, digital sets were scouted by the director and cinematographer in VR headsets before they were finished for the LED wall, and the show's creator Jon Favreau came to the project after using VR and virtual cameras in the production of The Lion King (2019).

Reviewed 6 October 2026. Re-read the ILM StageCraft page and announcements, American Cinematographer, IndieWire, fxguide, AWN, Khronos, Filmmaker and befores & afters articles against every claim, figure, quote and title, and checked both ACM papers (authors, venues, dates, DOIs, abstracts) via Crossref and Semantic Scholar. About review dates.

History

Origins

According to IndieWire, the idea behind StageCraft goes back to 2008, when George Lucas was planning the first live-action Star Wars television series and concluded that a real-time game engine would be needed to generate computer-generated environments on set. Richard Bluff, who then ran ILM's digital matte environments department, was brought in to work on a virtual production solution, but the idea did not reach production until Favreau joined The Mandalorian.

American Cinematographer reported that Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy approached Favreau about a project in 2016. Bluff and Rob Bredow, ILM's executive creative director and head, showed Favreau tests that ILM had carried out, including the LED wall technology used on Rogue One. Favreau said he was "very encouraged by my experiences using similar technology on Jungle Book and using virtual cameras on The Lion King", and that he had tried a partial video wall on the pilot of The Orville. The magazine credits the underlying concept of real-time, in-camera compositing to Kim Libreri, who first proposed it while working at Lucasfilm; by 2020 Libreri was chief technology officer of Epic Games. In ILM's announcement, Bredow said that "StageCraft has grown out of the culmination of over a decade of innovation in the virtual production space at ILM".

The Mandalorian season 1

ILM's September 2020 announcement states that the original StageCraft LED volume was developed for the first season of The Mandalorian in 2018, at Manhattan Beach Studios in Los Angeles. ILM and Epic Games presented the system publicly on 20 February 2020, together with technology partners Fuse, Lux Machina, Profile Studios, NVIDIA and ARRI and with Favreau's company Golem Creations. ILM said that the environments were rendered on NVIDIA GPUs and "lit and rendered from the perspective of the camera to provide parallax in real-time", and that the method was used for over 50 percent of the first season, "eliminating the need for location shoots entirely". In the same announcement, ILM described its StageCraft platform as combined with "the real-time interactivity of the Unreal Engine platform". IndieWire reported that ILM worked with Libreri to customize Unreal Engine to drive the content on the LED wall, and that ILM said it was making StageCraft available to the wider industry.

American Cinematographer described the first-season stage, which the crew called "the Volume", as follows:

Element	Specification (season 1)
LED wall	Curved wall 20 ft high and 180 ft in circumference, made of 1,326 individual LED screens with a 2.84 mm pixel pitch, forming a 270-degree semicircle
Performance area	75 ft in diameter, under an LED video ceiling
Rear walls	Two movable flat panels, each 18 ft high and 20 ft wide, of 132 more LED screens covering the remaining 90 degrees
Camera tracking	Profile Studios motion-capture system with infrared cameras above the LED walls following IR markers on the production camera
Rendering	11 interlinked computers; three processors for real-time rendering and four servers feeding three 4K images side by side on the wall and one 4K image on the ceiling
Image size	12,288 by 2,160 pixels on the wall and 4,096 by 2,160 on the ceiling
Latency	10-12 frames (roughly half a second) from camera position data to the updated image on the wall

StageCraft 2.0 and Helios

For the second season of The Mandalorian, fxguide reported that ILM moved to "an in-house real-time renderer, dubbed Helios", built a larger stage of a different shape, and tracked the camera both inside and outside the volume. In a 2023 DigiPro talk, Stephen Hill of Lucasfilm and Jeroen Schulte of ILM wrote that ILM "developed and augmented proprietary technology solutions in StageCraft 2.0, including a new real-time rendering engine, Helios", together with interactive on-set tools, and that ILM had continued to develop Helios after the second season. In a January 2021 fxguide article on The Midnight Sky, for which Steve Ellis was ILM's StageCraft CG supervisor in London, ILM said it had recently introduced the Vulkan API into Helios and was doing real-time ray tracing in the renderer, although that capability was not used on the film.

Unreal Engine remained part of the toolset. In November 2021 Bredow said that "productions can leverage our proprietary Helios cinema engine or Unreal Engine within our StageCraft toolset". For the 2022 film The Batman, ILM set up a custom pop-up StageCraft volume in London to film views of the Gotham skyline behind the actors; IndieWire reported that the content was "powered in real-time by Epic's Unreal engine".

Expansion

On 10 September 2020 ILM announced a second permanent StageCraft volume at Manhattan Beach Studios, a third at Pinewood Studios in London and a fourth, custom volume at Fox Studios Australia for Marvel's Thor: Love and Thunder. It said the new stages were larger, used "substantially more LED panels" than the original, and had higher resolution and smooth transitions between wall and ceiling, and it expected the London stage to open in February 2021 and the second Los Angeles stage in March 2021. ILM also offered temporary "pop up" volumes, such as the one it had built for George Clooney's Netflix film The Midnight Sky. That volume, at Shepperton Studios, had a main wall in a relaxed "L" shape 43 m wide and 6 m high, made primarily of Black Pearl 2 (BP2) LED panels with a 2.84 mm pixel pitch and 1,500 nits maximum brightness. fxguide noted that ILM had also worked with ROE Black Pearl BP2 panels on the first season of The Mandalorian.

On 17 November 2021 ILM announced a stage of over 20,000 square feet in Vancouver, British Columbia, which it called its fifth permanent volume and planned to open in spring 2022. At that time ILM ran three stages in Los Angeles and one at Pinewood. The announcement also mentioned a StageCraft volume that Disney Television Studios and ILM had opened on the Disney lot in Burbank for episodic television. The Disney+ series Percy Jackson and the Olympians was the first production in the Vancouver volume; its cinematographer Pierre Gill estimated that about 30 percent of his episodes were shot there, on a 95-foot LED wall.

Volume	Status as reported	Source
Manhattan Beach Studios, Los Angeles (original)	Developed in 2018 for The Mandalorian season 1
Manhattan Beach Studios, Los Angeles (second)	Announced September 2020; expected March 2021
Pinewood Studios, London	Announced September 2020; expected February 2021
Fox Studios Australia, Sydney	Custom volume for Thor: Love and Thunder
Shepperton Studios, UK	Temporary volume for The Midnight Sky
Disney lot, Burbank	Opening for episodic television reported in November 2021
Vancouver, British Columbia	Announced November 2021; first used by Percy Jackson and the Olympians

Recognition and later work

On 29 July 2022 the Television Academy named StageCraft a recipient of the 74th Engineering, Science and Technology Emmy Awards. ILM's announcement listed The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, How I Met Your Father, Obi-Wan Kenobi and The Old Man among the series that had used it.

At SIGGRAPH 2025, ILM's David Hirschfield and Mike Jutan presented Oscar, "a suite of tablet-based user interfaces" built to support StageCraft operators as they carry out a filmmaker's on-set requests. According to the paper, as quoted by befores & afters, Oscar was built with the iPad Python environment Pythonista and integrates with Zeno, ILM's proprietary content creation software.

StageCraft has also been used outside scripted film and television. ILM made a mobile deployment of the system for NBC's coverage of the 2024 Paris Olympics and returned for the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, building LED volume backdrops for promotional shoots with United States athletes. ILM described Milan Cortina as its "first all-48fps volume shoot": on the Paris shoot the cameras had run at 48 frames per second while the wall content played at 24, and matching the wall to the camera required synchronizing camera, content and wall to 1/48 of a second instead of 1/24. As of October 2026, ILM continues to offer StageCraft as a service, alongside its Technoprops virtual production hardware division and its performance and facial capture work.

Features

ILM's Emmy announcement describes StageCraft as bringing together "a real-time engine, a real-time renderer, high-quality color management, physical camera equipment, LED displays, motion-capture technologies, synchronization methodologies and tailored on-set user interfaces". It says the platform lets productions "design, scout and light environments in advance of the shoot and then capture that vision in camera during principal photography". ILM's 2020 description lists the stages it covers as initial exploration, scouting, art direction, traditional and technical previsualization, lighting and real-time filming in the LED volumes.

Camera tracking and the frustum

The image on the wall is drawn for the camera's tracked position. On the first season, Profile Studios' motion-capture cameras tracked infrared markers on the production camera, and that data was fed into ILM's StageCraft software and then into Unreal Engine. Because the full wall could not be rendered at photoreal quality in real time, the system rendered a high-resolution image only inside the camera's field of view (the "frustum") for the lens in use; the rest of the wall showed a lower-resolution image that still supplied lighting and reflections. To hide the half-second latency when the camera moved, the frustum was drawn on average 40 percent larger than the camera's actual field of view.

Content creation

American Cinematographer reported that ILM's team found the best way to get photoreal content onto the wall was to photograph real places, so many environments were built from photographic scans of real locations; environments with no real-world counterpart were built entirely by ILM's environments team. IndieWire reported that ILM also built miniature models, photographed them thousands of times and generated CG models from the images (photogrammetry), which became real-time environments. For the 2026 Olympics shoots, an ILM artist captured photo and video reference and LiDAR scans of locations in Italy as the basis for the wall content. fxguide reported that for the second season of The Mandalorian, content could be made in Unreal, Houdini, 3ds Max or other packages and was then read into Helios for display on the shoot days.

Rendering

Hill and Schulte's DigiPro abstract describes the Helios frame as built from rendering passes that include geometry submission, direct lighting, ray-traced reflections and volumetrics, fed by streaming systems, with an integrated color pipeline and controls for changes to the virtual content on the day of shooting. fxguide reported that StageCraft 2.0 and Helios let the second-season team add smoke and fog (participating media) to the virtual environments and adjust them in real time. In 2021 Ellis told fxguide that Helios "can actually handle huge amounts of polygons as in millions of polygons in real-time".

Use of virtual reality

Virtual reality is used in StageCraft mainly before filming, to plan the digital sets that later appear on the LED wall.

• Virtual scouting. American Cinematographer described how the virtual art department builds 3D virtual sets to the production designer's specifications; the director and cinematographer then enter the virtual location with VR headsets for a virtual scout, moving digital actors, props and sets and choosing coverage.
• Building environments. IndieWire reported that for the first season, environments were first created in VR during pre-production and then handed to ILM's visual effects team to be finished to photoreal quality while still running in a game engine on set. For the Mos Eisley Cantina, Bluff said the team rehearsed in VR "exactly where the cameras were going to go".
• Department reviews. For the second season, fxguide reported that Unreal Engine 4 was used by all departments for previsualization, including a virtual art department that "also leverages VR for scouting and heads of department reviews".

IndieWire linked these practices to Favreau's earlier work. He had made "the virtual production leap" on The Lion King "with the help of virtual reality and the real-time game engine", and his approach to The Mandalorian was "predicated on his familiarity with VR prep for location scouting, camera layout, and full previs". Bredow said in ILM's 2020 announcement that merging ILM's work with "what Jon Favreau has been working towards using virtual reality and game engine technology in his filmmaking finally gave us the chance to execute the vision".

Productions

The following productions are documented as having used StageCraft volumes. ILM also stated in 2020 that earlier films including Avengers: Endgame, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Solo: A Star Wars Story and Ready Player One had used "aspects of the toolset".

Production	Type	Notes	Source
The Mandalorian	Television series	First StageCraft volume (season 1); StageCraft 2.0 and Helios (season 2)
The Midnight Sky	Film (2020)	Temporary volume at Shepperton Studios
The Book of Boba Fett	Television series	Listed by ILM
How I Met Your Father	Television series	Listed by ILM
Obi-Wan Kenobi	Television series	Listed by ILM
The Old Man	Television series	Listed by ILM
The Batman	Film (2022)	Pop-up volume in London for Gotham skyline scenes
Thor: Love and Thunder	Film (2022)	Custom volume at Fox Studios Australia
Percy Jackson and the Olympians	Television series	First production in the Vancouver volume
NBC Olympics promotional shoots	Sports broadcast promotion	Paris 2024 and Milan Cortina 2026

Research

ILM engineers have described StageCraft in talks published in ACM conference proceedings. Hill and Schulte's "Lights, Camera, Interaction! The Real-Time Technology of ILM StageCraft" (DigiPro 2023) explains why ILM wrote its own renderer and on-set tools, and calls StageCraft a suite that "incorporates powerful off-the-shelf systems, such as Unreal, with proprietary solutions". Hirschfield and Jutan's "Designing Oscar: Bespoke Tablet Workflows in ILM StageCraft" (SIGGRAPH Talks 2025) covers the operator interfaces.

See also

• Virtual production
• Unreal Engine
• Game engine
• Motion capture
• Facial motion capture
• Photogrammetry
• ILMxLAB
• Projection mapping