Recreating London’s iconic spots through Virtual Production

The challenges

The images needed to evoke a strong sense of place. There was just one problem: actually shooting in London wasn’t an option. Between tight budgets, unpredictable weather, and an accelerated timeline, a location shoot was off the table. But authenticity still mattered. The imagery couldn’t look generic or artificial. It had to feel real, rooted, and relevant.

Our approach

We turned to our LED Virtual Production capabilities to bring London to life, digitally. It offered us the creative control of a studio shoot, while still achieving the authenticity of a location shoot.

We began by displaying the first of our selected digital backdrops: Tower Bridge. Our team worked through a series of technical considerations to get the scene right. Although the backdrop was captured at a specific focal length, we tested a variety of lenses and setups to ensure the image scale, perspective, and subject placement all felt true to life.

Key decisions included:

• Matching camera-to-subject and subject-to-screen distances

• Selecting the right lens and aperture to achieve realistic depth of field

• Carefully balancing foreground, midground, and background to create visual depth

One of the most critical elements was matching the lighting of the subject to the lighting in the scene. The Tower Bridge backdrop included strong directional light with tree-dappled shadows, which we mirrored using a mix of hard and soft sources to create believable light play across the guestbook stand. With generative AI, we can usually tweak the environment to suit our setup; adjusting angles, shadows, or time of day. But in this case, working with photographic plates of real locations, the challenge was reversed: we had to adapt our lighting to match the scene, not the other way around.

To further embed the subject into the environment, we replicated reflected sky highlights on the book and padlock, making the composite feel natural and grounded.

To trick the eye and enhance realism, we added physical prop cues into the midground and foreground, including real tree branches to complement the wintery trees seen in the digital scene. These touches helped blur the line between digital and physical, especially with our chosen depth of field, which subtly softened the boundaries between layers.

Still imagery in Virtual Production lends itself well to additional finesse in post. While we didn’t need to blend the VP background further in this case, we used colour grading and subtle retouching to fine-tune tones and unify all elements into a cohesive visual.