The Toronto studio behind the LED volume work on ‘The Boys’ and ‘Heated Rivalry’ picks up the equipment built for several ‘Star Trek’ series, 6 months after Sony moved to close the VFX company.
Toronto-based virtual production and animation studio Dark Slope has acquired virtual production assets from Pixomondo, the Sony-owned VFX and virtual production company, along with select assets from Pixomondo’s Vancouver operation. Dark Slope announced the deal last Tuesday.
The acquisition comes six months after Sony Pictures Entertainmentdecided to wind down Pixomondo, the Oscar- and Emmy-winning VFX and virtual production company it bought in 2022. Sony said this past March that Pixomondo’s VFX work would move to Sony Pictures Imageworks and its virtual production division would close once existing projects and contracts were complete; Pixomondo management put the number of people affected at about 500.
Equipment acquired by Dark Slope includes LED stages built for Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. When the company announced its Toronto virtual production build in 2020, it billed the facility as “the largest in the world.”
One leading use of Virtual production puts actors inside LED volumes, where walls of high-resolution panels display computer-generated environments around them in real time. The visuals are often of high-enough resolution to be used in final output.
The equipment adds to Dark Slope’s 75,000-square-foot Toronto production campus and lets the studio design and deploy custom LED volumes for productions of virtually any size, both at its own studios and on location.
“Productions are under enormous pressure to deliver bigger, more cinematic worlds while being smarter about managing ever-evolving budgets and production schedules,” said Dark Slope president Dan Fill. “Dark Slope has always been focused on solving that problem: Giving filmmakers an elevated look without an elevated price tag. This acquisition takes us a step further. We can now build a custom LED volume to virtually any scale and bring it to the production, rather than forcing the production to fit the stage.”
The studio has handled virtual production for Ginny & Georgia, The Boys and its spinoff Gen V, and the HBO Max/Crave breakout Heated Rivalry, which filmed extensively at its Toronto facility. Its virtual production team will also support an upcoming preschool puppet-hybrid production, and the studio is seeing growing demand from unscripted shows that use LED volumes for game and competition formats.
“These are industry leading virtual production assets built to support productions at the highest level, and Dark Slope has the team and expertise to maximize what they can do,” said Christopher Cox, who leads virtual production globally at Pixomondo and heads its PXO Clara division. “As Canada continues to attract ambitious film and television projects, Dark Slope is well positioned to put this technology to work for the next generation of productions shooting here.”
Dark Slope also plans to open a new studio in Vancouver in the coming weeks.
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
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