Here’s how hard it is to make a mixed-reality trailer for HTC Vive VR games

Virtual reality is a difficult technology to demonstrate to people, but mixed reality is changing that. That doesn’t mean it’s an easy thing to pull off, though.

To promote the launch of Job Simulator and Fantastic Contraption for the HTC Vive VR headset, videographer Kert Gartner has helped those developers create videos that show real people inside the games they’re playing. And now, Gartner has uploaded a behind-the-scenes featurette that shows the complicated process that goes into filming a scene simultaneously in virtual reality and actual reality. For example, he needed to rent a green-screen studio and he needed to hire a crew and actors. That’s a bit more intense than the typical video game trailer Gartner creates almost entirely by himself. But for a VR industry that could generate as much as $40 billion in revenue by 2020, according to SuperData Research, figuring out how to demonstrate the experience of walking around a simulated space is crucial. And, according to Gartner, it was a fun challenge as well.

One of the key things this video reveals is just how many moving parts are involved in recording multiple realities at once. For these shoots, Gartner had to ensure he was filming the actors while simultaneously capturing multiple in-game layers that include what the player was seeing and what the virtual camera was seeing. Oh, and that virtual camera required the crew to mount a third HTC Vive controller to the top of a camera for tracking.

Gartner then took two days to composite the shots together into footage he could edit into something that looks professional.

“Being involved in the first of these kinds of things is really, really fun,” Gartner said in the video. “It’s fun to work through all the technical problems, and it’s fun to figure out how to shoot in VR and what you need to do to make that look good. It was stressful, but it was really exciting at the same time.”