In The Crash, a considerable amount of scenes (and screen time) take place in the Dutch parliament as investigations about the cause of the crash and the mysterious cargo inside the plane are an important part of the narrative. The two main spaces where Dutch government resides, the First Chamber (Eerste Kamer, or 'senate') and Second Chamber (Tweede Kamer, or 'house of representatives') are not accessible to film crews, nor do they look like they used to in the period 1992 - 1998 when the story is set.
As constructing the sets in full was not an option budget-wise, and partly building the sets would mean countless shots would rely on VFX set extensions (not to mention the technicalities of shooting in a chroma key setup), the choice was made to solve these scenes with the use of big L.E.D. screens, a technique these days synonymous with the term ‘virtual production’. The precise term describing our use of this type of virtual production is ‘ICVFX’ which stands for 'In-Camera Visual Effects'.
The benefit of using ICVFX and creating digital environments of the parliament spaces, was that once these assets are created and optimised for use on the L.E.D. walls, the crew can -within some boundaries- shoot whatever angle they want with runs covering any length, directly live on set and evaluating the in-camera results. The light emitting from the L.E.D. wall helps the integration of fore-mid-and background as the emitted color and brightness of the content being displayed on the wall, actually ‘lights’ the actors and sets in front of it.
The decision was made to set up the parliament environments in Unreal Engine, basically creating a full 3D game level for both First and Second Chamber. Assets of the furniture and other objects were modelled based on photo references and archival source footage. The modular character of these environments allowed for quick repetition and then make some tweaks to details and add randomness.
