Director Daniel Carrai on “Smoke”: Virtual Production on a $10,000 Budget

Fifteen locations, four days, and not a single lip-synced shot, inside the virtual production workflow behind SLIDE’s debut video.

“Smoke” is the debut music video from Daniel Carrai‘s band SLIDE, shot across fifteen locations in four days on a $10,000 budget, using virtual production to blur the line between what’s real and what’s built inside an LED volume.

Carrai breaks down how the shoot actually came together: the setup inside the volume, what went wrong on set, and the small decisions, from a cardboard rock to live goats on an LED stage, that made the illusion work. Here’s Daniel Carrai, in his own words.

The Reversal

For years I made videos for other companies. Music videos, live recordings, commercials. I was always the hired hand: someone else’s vision, someone else’s sign-off, someone else’s final cut.

On “Smoke,” I was the company and the client. This is my band, and my production company. There was no brief, no approvals, and nobody to talk me out of my crazy idea. Concept, production, performance, edit, color, sound design, final sign-off: I could carry one vision all the way through, with a crew of incredible people collaborating to actually make it happen.

The clearest proof of what that bought us is a decision I don’t think I’d have been allowed to make on a client job.

Nobody Sings in This Video

I’ve always found it strange when a music video builds a narrative world and then cuts to the singer performing. It can work. But often it just pulls you out of the world.

Most clients would have wanted the performer performing. That’s what the video is for, from a label’s perspective. But we pushed it even further: most of the video isn’t even focused on the three of us. The video focuses on other people in the realm. The band members are travelers passing through, not the subject.

The Story

Three travelers cross unwelcoming realms in search of something more. Every relationship proves illusory, following the same primal pattern nature built into them. Through chaos and fighting, that pattern reveals itself as the whole system. In pain and passion, the travelers have to find their own path as they decide who they can trust.

Nearly every shot has a second meaning. This is the first visible piece of a world we intend to expand. The video works on its own, but it’s an introduction, and a lot of what reads as set dressing now is set up to pay off later.

Fifteen Locations, Four Days, $10,000

The hardest logistical problem in this video was the location count. The script called for more than fifteen distinct places. That’s normally a problem you solve by cutting locations. We didn’t want to cut.

Virtual production was the only route that made it possible. But the goal was never to hide behind the wall. It was important to me that the audience couldn’t tell which shots were in the volume and which were real. So we chose practical locations that contained several very different-looking areas within one site, and matched the two worlds in framing and grade.

It’s been cool to see people guess wrong in both directions since release, calling real locations virtual and virtual shots real. That was exactly the outcome I wanted.

Where the Money Went

The total budget was $10,000:

• $4,000 — crew
• $3,000 — camera rentals
• $1,400 — food and craft services
• $1,000 — props
• $600 — assets for the virtual production studio

So many people gave their time to this, and the locations gave us their space. That generosity is the real reason a $10,000 budget reached this far.

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First Time in a Volume, as an Unreal Novice

I’d never shot in a virtual production studio before, and I was genuinely nervous going in. I’m also an Unreal Engine beginner, and prepping every environment we wanted to shoot was an enormous amount of work ahead of the shoot.

Maya VP Studio and VP supervisor Ian Lee are the reason it came together. Ian let me push the project well past what a first-timer should probably have been allowed to attempt.

Getting into the volume a few times just to experiment made all the difference. My friend Joshua Meza and I worked through a handful of techniques ahead of the shoot: overlaying foreground elements in camera so we had a live reference on the monitor, 3D-tracking a real-world object and attaching it to a light inside Unreal, and connecting Ableton to Unreal so the track itself could trigger lightning and object movement in the environment. That last one is something I’ve only scratched the surface of and plan to build on in future work.

What Broke

Things broke. We were pushing the volume hard: triggering lightning while moving the camera to match our walking speed while running a programmed techno crane move, across multiple scenes with multiple people. A lot of those elements were custom-developed for this shoot, so when something failed, we were recoding and adjusting on the day.

Two things saved us:

• I scheduled in plenty of extra time. Being my first time in a volume, I knew we’d have problems.
• A trick that worked for this shoot was filling the shot list with “nice to have” shots. Deliberately, easy things to cut that would help the edit, but not necessary. That meant when we lost time, there was always something I could do to make our day. Because of that, there was nothing crucial we didn’t get and we ended our days on time.

One Prop Doing the Work of Fifteen Sets

With that many environments, building full practical foreground for each one was never realistic on our budget. So we focused on a small number of key props that could integrate into multiple worlds.

Production designer Garrett Tyler built a 4ft x 4ft x 6ft rock out of cardboard and spray foam. It appears in several scenes, and it did more than almost anything else to tie the LED background to the physical foreground, practically, rather than in post. We also brought live goats into the volume for one sequence, real animals standing in a virtual realm, which is exactly the kind of collision this format makes possible.

Extending Past the Wall

The wall is 35 feet, and plenty of our frames needed more than that. Set extension became the biggest post-roadblock on the project.

Our VFX artist Matthew Collamore reconstructed the scenes in Cinema 4D, filled the gaps beyond the wall coverage, comped the extended scene, and delivered alpha passes to me. I did the final color pass to blend everything so the seam disappeared.

The Stained Glass

We shot a chapel scene at a real chapel with a conventional stained glass window. Our story isn’t set on Earth, so Earth iconography wouldn’t work.

I built a reference package and hired a designer to create a replacement panel. The new window points to the hidden story of the realm. It’s one of the clearest examples in the video of something that reads as set dressing now and pays off later.

On AI

Worth stating plainly: there is no AI-generated content anywhere in the final product. AI was a useful tool at points during the production process, but we took the position that nothing in the finished film would be generated.

Directing Myself

This was my first time directing a piece I was also in, and it was far more enjoyable than I expected. Before, I’d have to translate my thoughts into words that would hit an actor’s ear, and they’d translate that into a performance. This was the first time I could go straight from thought to performance. Getting in front of the camera and executing it down to every aspect myself.

“Smoke” is just the first view into the world of SLIDE.

Gear

Sony Burano – Canon Cine-Servo and DZOFilm Vespid primes – Freefly Ember S5K with a 720nm IR filter for black-and-white exteriors, PL mount – Maya VP Studio | 35ft LED wall, OptiTrack camera tracking system

Credits

Director | Daniel Carrai Producer | Alyssa Carrai Production Coordinator | Miranda Moreno Cinematographer | Luke Fletcher AD | Jerod Wood Production Designer | Garrett Tyler Gaffer | Caleb Guest 1st AC | Owen Stafford 2nd AC | Eric Flores Crane Operator | Hudson Stafford Grip | Jake Poindexter Grip | Henry Cobe Utility | Maurice Victor Virtual Production Supervisor | Ian Lee Post Production | Daniel Carrai VFX | Matthew Collamore VFX R&D | Joshua Meza Photo | Bryan Bull BTS Video | Johnathan Daniels Management | Louis Coppola Production Company | Sever Films Label | Make Wake Records Virtual Production Studio | Maya VP Studio Specialty Camera Systems | 4 Velocity Wardrobe | Lamb Fabricae Animal Rental | Farm Adventures Location | The Little Chapel at Haven Ridge.

Talent: Kyle Reith, Brady Novak, Daniel Carrai (Travelers); Reid Perry, C T Ross, Max Pardon, Dominik Livinsky, Richard Rutsky, Corey Collins, Saby Maras, Elbert Kim (Elderly Group); Jessica Harvey, Grace MacManamy (Tent); Stevie MacManamy (Angry Dog); Rushil Kasturi (Tied Up); Erin Buell (Chapel); Aaman Al Rasul (Woods); Maurice Victor (Fire); Lyn Rutsky (Bunker); Nathan Wyatt (Sky)