Virtual Production for Commercials: How Agencies Get More Spots Out of One Shoot Day

Film productions that use LED volumes let commercial teams capture multiple spots, cutdowns, and platform variants. They achieve this by swapping environments digitally on the LED wall rather than moving the company to new locations.

This virtual production (VP) can help creative agencies tackle some of the biggest challenges in modern commercial video production, such as high content output and tight timelines. Here's everything to consider when choosing virtual production for commercials.

The Client Math Agencies Are Up Against

Creative and advertising companies face various challenges, even with the best clients. These challenges are often unavoidable and inherent to the creative process, but the right production approach can significantly reduce their potential impact.

Key challenges include:

• Always-on channels: Many brands rely on long-term marketing campaigns, with consistent content across multiple platforms. This demands a high content output, often requiring production teams to batch multiple shoots into a single day.
• More formats per campaign: Using multiple social media platforms and distribution channels often requires agencies to export films in multiple formats and runtimes. This can often be achieved in post-production, such as by making multiple cuts of the same video at different lengths. However, effective pre-production planning and production strategies can help you plan for each format early on, ensuring you don't cut crucial parts of your message for certain platforms.
• Shrinking timelines: Agencies often have limited time windows to complete clients' productions and send over campaign deliverables. These timelines can shrink because of unpredictable factors. Because of this, agencies often rely on production strategies that prioritize speed, such as shooting multiple films with minimal post-production needs on an LED volume.
• Performance accountability: Clients often hold production partners and agencies responsible for their projects' business outcomes. This underscores the need for high-quality deliverables that align with clients' audiences and goals.
• Revisions and reshoots: Even if you capture their vision exactly as it was described, some clients may still be unhappy with the final result. Reshoots, revisions, and creative changes can cost your production more time and money, though you can potentially reduce these risks with effective pre-visualization and test shoots during pre-production.

How One Shoot Day Becomes a Full Deliverable Set

Using virtual production for commercials significantly expands what you can achieve with a single production day. Depending on your campaign, you can use the volume to create an engaging and immersive narrative that traverses multiple locations without ever leaving the studio facility. Alternatively, you can capture multiple shoots and videos back-to-back, filling an always-on campaign schedule in just one day.

LED volumes use either 2D plates with pre-rendered backgrounds or 3D plates with real-time rendering. Both options let you swap environments in minutes. This back-to-back location-swap workflow eliminates travel and weather risks, shortens production timelines, maximizes your team's creative control, and locks continuity across each shot. For maximum efficiency on multi-shoot days, you can set up video batches by look, such as by filming several interviews with the same background in a row.

LED volumes also enable instant resets, which is crucial for scenes with movement or action. For instance, a traditional driving scene would require the crew to drive the vehicle back to position A and reset any background elements. However, resetting a driving scene filmed with a stationary vehicle in front of an LED wall only requires the crew to hit a few buttons.

In-Camera Finals: Why the Edit Starts Closer to Finished

With in-camera VFX (ICVFX), virtual production lets you see exactly how your backgrounds and VFX look before you even film. This eliminates the typical guesswork of using VFX or green screens in film. Camera teams can frame subjects more appropriately, script supervisors can accurately assess continuity, and grip and electrics teams can confidently match on-set lighting to the background.

Eliminating guesswork is especially important for meeting clients' expectations. With ICVFX, what the client sees closely matches the delivered frame. Virtual production teams often carve out time for pre-visualization during pre-production, letting you see your film's final look before the camera rolls. This gives you and the client more opportunities to make creative changes and weave in brand imagery and visual storytelling, such as by incorporating brand colors in a virtual environment.

In-camera VFX also offer significant advantages for your post-production process:

• Faster turnaround on deliverables: Capturing ICVFX in camera saves your post-production team several time-consuming steps, such as compositing VFX layers and correcting the color and lighting. This saves agencies crucial time between production and distribution, enabling faster turnaround and more time for revisions.
• Simpler editing process than green screens: Green screens often require editors to manage color spillage, uneven lighting, camera compression, and other issues. Filming with an LED volume rather than a green screen eliminates much of the post-production VFX work, simply because of how virtual production works.
• Minimal revisions or creative changes: Pre-visualization and ICVFX let clients see their final look early, reducing the risk of creative overhauls in post-production. This typically means fewer compositing rounds, less demanding revisions, and faster approvals.
• Practical reshoots: If the client shifts their creative direction after production has already wrapped, virtual production makes it easy to pick back up where you left off. Most VP studios store client and project assets long-term, allowing you to easily return to the same virtual environment while maintaining continuity and quality.

The Client-on-Set Experience Is Part of the Pitch

Clients who want to visit the set should be able to watch near-final footage live and leave impressed.

Many virtual studios include "video village" stations with monitors so clients can see what's happening on camera. Other studios offer client lounges and viewing rooms where clients can comfortably watch everything from outside the sound stage. This maximizes available on-set floor space and ensures chatter or devices don't disrupt audio quality without taking clients out of the experience.

A positive client-on-set experience can turn a shoot day into an important relationship asset, helping you build trust and memorability with your production partners. Consider everything that can potentially influence your client experiences, including:

• The LED volume's technical capabilities
• The studio and crew's ability to collaborate and adapt to different visions
• Climate control and temperatures
• On-site amenities, such as lounges, break rooms, and restrooms
• Parking and load-in zones

What You Can Promise on the Board — and Actually Deliver

Clients may not see the benefits of virtual production advertising if you don't translate the mechanics into business language. Forge's agency pitch kit can help you make your case in a way key decision-makers will understand.

Locked Dates Regardless of Weather

Traditional production shoots are often scheduled at the whim of the weather. Unexpected rain can completely ruin an outdoor shoot and even impair sound quality for indoor productions.

Virtual production eliminates these issues by letting you film at seemingly any location inside a controlled sound stage. This way, you can lock production dates, confident that weather and other traditional setbacks won't disrupt clients' schedules or marketing campaigns.

Multiple Looks Per Day

An on-set VP team can change your LED volume's visuals while you're on set, letting you switch background environments in just a few minutes. This significantly expands how much you can achieve in a single production day by eliminating the need for location swaps and company moves. It can also lower your budget by minimizing travel, permit, and insurance costs.

Consistent Visuals

Most studios keep the volume's visual assets, such as brand-specific custom environments, after your production wraps. This means you can easily return to the same virtual production studio later and build upon your previous films. This is especially important for branded content and episodic campaigns that rely on consistent imagery for recall and recognition.

Platform Variants In-Session

Using LED walls for commercial production lets you capture multiple film variations at once. With fast resets, you can quickly capture different takes for different platforms. For instance, you can switch between horizontal and vertical aspect ratios without cropping the footage or impacting video quality by quickly filming both versions on set.

Taking it a step further, easy-to-swap backgrounds let you film slightly different versions of the same movie for different markets. So, if you're marketing to specific cities, you could capture the same moment in front of different landmarks in each location. This gives you multiple location-specific campaign deliverables while only requiring a little extra time on set.

The Commercial Formats That Benefit Most

Virtual production is especially ideal for the following commercial film formats:

• Car spots: Driving plates in virtual production create a real-time background for scenes with vehicles, whether the camera's on the car's exterior or on the driver inside. This can streamline vehicle-based productions by eliminating lengthy resets, permits, road closures, and other issues created by traditional driving scenes.
• Product and tabletop: These commercials hinge on high-quality close-up shots with dynamic backgrounds, intentional lighting, and fluid camera movement. LED wall commercial production studios meet this demand with bright, immersive backdrops that respond in real time to the camera.
• Dialogue-driven brand films: Engaging visuals can help hold viewers' attention for dialogue- and audio-heavy projects while subtly incorporating brand imagery. Additionally, filming in a controlled, sound-treated environment ensures the microphones pick up every word.
• Episodic series: Lighter-lift workflows created by 2D plate filming and ICVFX can streamline production and post-production workflows for faster distribution, allowing brands to continuously add to existing campaigns. Plus, clients and agencies can re-use VFX assets later to save time in pre-production and build each film's imagery off the last.

Budgeting a Commercial on the Volume

Several factors can affect the total cost of your unique commercial production, including project size, timeline, and location. At the same time, moving your film to a virtual stage can offset some of the costs of traditional production processes, such as separate rental costs and distributed location risks.

For example, commercial video production in Chicago often requires you to budget for permits, weather, traffic, parking, and a lot more, especially when filming outdoors. However, you can dodge most of these concerns when filming in a VP studio while still capturing both interior and exterior scenes.

Check out our guide on what a film studio rental costs to learn more.

Pitch Bigger on Your Next Board

The idea is rarely the constraint with modern productions — it's the logistics. However, virtual production for commercials can streamline your client's next project while expanding what your agency can practically achieve.

Located just outside of Chicago, Forge Virtual Studios offers multiple studio spaces with access to LED walls, high-power lights, and everything you need for a positive client-on-set experience. Explore our For Agencies page to learn more about our process, and contact us to discuss projects or book a tour.