Central and Eastern Europe’s largest virtual film studio to be built in Hungary

The HUF 11,000,000 (EUR 28,103) investment is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2024 by Visual Europe Group Hungary. The largest virtual film studio in the Central and Eastern European region will be built at HelloParks in Fót, Pest county. The biggest ever public investment in film is underway at the studio.

Hundreds of square meters of LED walls will be installed in the virtual studio under construction, alongside state-of-the-art camera and lighting systems, as well as film, broadcast and media system solutions. This will allow images created by the LED walls to be used as a backdrop to the scene, rather than a real set. According to telex.hu, these images are capable of depicting any environment in a photo-realistic, 3D way.

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The biggest ever public investment in film

The development will also see the construction of one of Hungary’s largest film studios, with a floor area of 4,945 m2 and a ceiling height of 18 metres, and the steel structures of the new studios are already being built, wrote National Film Institute (NFI) on Facebook.

This will also make the actors’ work easier, as they will be able to see the virtual environment in which they are acting, unlike with green box backdrops. With this solution, there is no need to adapt to the weather conditions and time of day on the set, as any environmental effect can be simulated in the background. The travel and transport costs and ecological footprint of productions will be reduced by orders of magnitude.

In Europe, a total of ten studios have a similar solution, the nearest being in Poland. Of the studios using similar technology in Hungary, there are three smaller ones, typically with waiting lists of several years.

A significant economic factor

“As a significant economic factor, the Hungarian film industry employs nearly 20,000 professionals and brings substantial benefits to the country, mainly in the form of foreign exchange earnings. With the rise of streaming content, film production spending has been growing steadily in recent years, and preliminary estimates suggest that spending in 2022 will increase by another 20 percent. The expansion of domestic studio capacity will provide a competitive advantage in the international environment and will also help to serve state-supported Hungarian productions, thus putting the Film Institute’s public service activities in a new perspective,” Csaba Káel, Government Commissioner for the Development of the Hungarian Film Industry and President of the National Film Institute said to nfi.hu.

Plans for the renowed film studio in Fót, Pest county

Photo: Facebook/Nemzeti Filmintézet, nfi.hu

For years, Hungary has been the most sought-after film production centre in Europe after London, and in 2022 the biggest studios and the most exciting stars, including Mel Gibson, Zendaya, Timothée Chalamet, and Kate Winslet filmed in Hungary. The revenues of the Hungarian film industry exceed HUF 250 billion (EUR 637,582,912) in 2022.

The construction of the HUF 11,000,000 (EUR 28,103) investment started last summer and will be carried out in several phases, with the overall development scheduled for completion in the first half of 2024.