Tim Pipher owns Castle Studios, the newest film production facility in town. Located on Alameda in the heart of Albuquerque, the property contains a high-tech space to shoot movies that’s not only unique to New Mexico; it may be the only stage of its kind in existence. Pipher says he believes it to be the “biggest” stage in the world. Having visited the studio recently for a private tour, I can confirm he’s not far off.
“I deal with producers and directors — even 20 years older than I am — and they just keep making movies. Clint Eastwood’s in his 90s, and he’s still directing,” points out Pipher as he guides me through the state-of-the-art digital studio. “But even those who have been in this business for decades have never seen anything like what I’m showing you here now,” Pipher says
With the technology available at Castle Studios, locations that don’t exist in New Mexico — beaches, tropical rainforests, Tokyo alleyways — can be loaded onto monitors in seconds and simultaneously broadcast onto screens located throughout the studio. Live feeds to the stage are displayed on screens in the dressing rooms, the stadium-style sky box overlooking the green screen and even inside the “big time talent” motor home parked outside. Castle Studios’ patented virtual set technology can make scenes indistinguishable from on-location shoots, saving money and saving the environment. Pipher spared many of the proprietary technological details, but the long and short of it is the studio’s cameras are capable of shooting every angle of a real location and “transporting” the scene into their green screen room.
“With our technology, scenes can take place with total reality anywhere in the universe. So, not only is it a better way to shoot — as hopefully you’ll agree with me — it’s an easier way to shoot. It’s a more cost-efficient way to shoot,” Pipher says.
During my visit to the property, Pipher first introduced me to his son, who was acting as the temporary cameraman, then invited me to stand in the center of Castle Studios’ massive set with lime green floors and walls. The futuristic-looking room was filled with cameras attached to shiny black metal frames and monitors placed every 50 feet or so along the length of the room. We pretended to play basketball as Pipher’s son shot us with a very big, remote-controlled camera attached to a cranelike mechanical arm.
When I looked at the monitors, Pipher and I weren’t in a green room anymore. We were running the length of a realistic-looking gymnasium. A quick change of scenes allowed us to explore the rusty interior of a virtual space station. The scenes look so realistic they are impossible to distinguish from a constructed set. At one point the camera zoomed in from afar and the shot seemed to travel “through” a railing, a shot Tim says would be impossible to do with a “real” set.
Pipher “loaded” another virtual set onto the monitors and explained it would be used for an upcoming TV show called “Celebrity Ping Pong,” which hasn’t made it to air yet. Pipher explained the show will have an interview component — kind of like a talk show segment — where the host and the participants sit on chairs and have conversations. As his son moved the camera into the correct position and angle for the shot — an adjustment that only took about three seconds — Pipher directed me to take a few small steps backward. On the monitors, we looked as if we had moved from the “talk show area” onto a platform overlooking contestants playing ping pong below.
“If you had to do that in the real world, you’re looking at spending hundreds of thousands just for the floor alone,” Pipher says.
Pipher explains that the studio can incorporate real props into the virtual sets as well. He asked me to imagine a movie scene requiring a fancy kitchen with a countertop island made of high-end granite or quartz.
“That’s a time-consuming and expensive thing to build. Well, I’m going to show you what you can do instead,” he says. “You want that expensive-looking island, but you don’t want to really build the island out here, so you stack those green boxes up to the height of the virtual island, put a coffee pot on it, then the actor can come in, pour himself a cup of coffee and sit down and have breakfast with his wife.”
Not only can the settings be manipulated using the technology at Castle Studios, the actors can be transformed into any character imaginable, and directors and production staff can see how the shots look in real-time. Pipher envisioned a hypothetical scene in which an alien chases a damsel in distress through demolished city streets.
“The way it’s done now, that alien doesn’t exist,” Pipher says. “You do it all in post-production with computer work that takes a year or more and millions of dollars to do. We can do it all live. We can turn you or me into Godzilla, make us as high as the ceiling or higher. Whatever we do, Godzilla will do, and we’ll be invisible.”
Pipher says the methods they use at Castle Studios are the “greenest” way to produce movies, and he’s not just talking about the property’s gymnasium-sized green screen studio. Pipher says shooting at Castle Studios reduces a production’s carbon footprint in several ways. No trees need to be cut for set construction, and since cast and crew can be much smaller and don’t need to drive or fly to different locations, travel emissions are cut significantly. Producers could even blow up a virtual set in a massive fireball without harming a single blade of grass.
Pipher has been in the TV business for a long time and spent the majority of that time shooting in LA. He says, unlike Castle Studios’ brand new location in Albuquerque, most of the studios he’s seen and worked in are usually a bit run down. The physical props available at Castle studios are top-of-the-line, just like the virtual technology used to shoot the scenes.
“In L.A., they’ve been making movies for 110 or 120 years,” he says. “We’ve done something here that I haven’t seen done in Hollywood or in the industry before. We bought a warehouse full of very high-end furniture and props. Normally you have to go out and find all this stuff, hope you can find the right couch or coffee table that your production designer envisions, and so on.”
The studio looks and even smells brand new, and everything from the dressing rooms to the dining areas for cast and crew look like they belong in a nice hotel. Pipher says Castle Studios envisioned every filming scenario imaginable. And if the prop or furniture doesn’t exist, they can always create it virtually.
“Everything is here,” Pipher says. “We wanted to make sure we had drive-in access, because you could do car scenes, like a police car driving into the murder scene and then driving out again.”
In the same way Pipher is a bit tight-lipped about the details of his studio’s patented camera technology, he’s reluctant to divulge too many details about the productions slated to be filmed at Castle Studios in the near future. He did mention a talk show in the works featuring comedian Kevin Hart and says they plan to bring some other big projects to New Mexico soon. Perhaps a star-studded comedy or a special-effects-heavy sci-fi feature is on the horizon.
“I’m not really going to say too much until they’re totally firm. But yeah, we got a lot going on,” he says.
For more information about Castle Studios’ patented virtual movie production and a virtual tour of the facilities visit lacastlestudios.com/.