“We Can Easily Do Nine Locations in a Day” says Hogarth, Spain
When the creative team behind a William Hill commercial asked for three different locations in a single day, Santiago Sánchez-Lozano didn’t flinch. Instead, Hogarth Spain’s virtual production (VP) department delivered nine distinct settings before the day was out – all without leaving the studio.
“With VP, we can easily do nine locations in a day!” Santiago tells me, describing how swapping virtual backgrounds lets his crew jump from a kitchen to a living room to wherever the script requires in minutes.
On a traditional shoot, managing even three locations in a day is considered ambitious, but with what he calls the “teleportation” power of VP, that kind of rapid scene change has become the new normal. It’s a feat that encapsulates the promise of virtual production: greater agility, creative freedom, and efficiency – all driven by a small, fearless team in Madrid.
Santiago Sánchez-Lozano, CEO of Hogarth Spain & Portugal, spearheaded the company’s leap into virtual production just two years ago. The initial push came from Hogarth’s global network, which was already embracing VP technology early on. “We’re always investigating new and more efficient ways to produce,” Santiago explains. Adopting VP was a bold bet on innovation, but it wasn’t without hurdles. “The main challenge, like with any tech implementation, is the mindset shift,” he says.
Within Hogarth’s own ranks and among clients, many were initially wary of this new way of working. Virtual sets and LED walls can be hard to grasp for those used to traditional shoots. But Santiago found that once people experienced it in action, the scepticism melted away. “As soon as they saw the benefits, they were delighted,” he notes. Seeing was believing.
Ask Santiago what makes virtual production so special, and he’ll enthusiastically tell you about its almost sci-fi superpowers.
He breaks VP’s value down into three big advantages: teleportation, time travel, and a weather control machine. In practice, this means location changes at the click of a button, the ability to recreate any time period or time of day on demand, and total control over weather and lighting conditions.
“If you have a creative idea that says, ‘I want to record just a sunrise,’ ... I can make it rain the way you want it to rain for 6 hours. We can do anything,” Santiago enthuses. Want to shoot an ancient Roman scene in the morning and be on Jupiter in 2035 by afternoon? With VP, no problem. This unprecedented agility has fundamentally reshaped collaboration with clients and creative agencies.
The first encounter can be jarring – “The first time they see it, they’re a bit sceptical; it’s hard to understand because it’s different,” he admits. But after a couple of visits to the set, “they immediately fall in love” with the process.
Once partners try virtual production, “they don’t want to do it any other way”. The ability to teleport between scenes, time travel across eras, and freeze perfect lighting on cue isn’t just a cool trick – it’s a new creative workflow that clients quickly become addicted to. Of course, virtual production isn’t a cure-all or a cost-cutting magic wand for every project, and Santiago is candid about that. He makes a point of guiding clients on when VP is the right tool for the job. Some assume shooting on LED stages will automatically be cheaper, but that’s not always true at first. “We had a conversation recently with a client who assumed that using VP would significantly lower the overall production costs,” he says.
In one case, creating an entire restaurant in 3D for a commercial was a hefty upfront investment – more than a traditional shoot if you only looked at that single project. The difference is that the virtual set can be reused over and over. Spread that 3D restaurant across 20 shoots in the next few years, and the economics flip in VP’s favour.
Santiago’s approach is to be “very honest, very transparent, and walk the path” with clients. For complex campaigns with multiple locations or hard-to-control environments, VP often is more efficient in time, budget, and carbon footprint. But for a straightforward shoot – say, a single kitchen scene – “traditional methods might still be easier. It all depends on the specific case,” he says.
Another ingredient in Hogarth’s VP success has been the integration of gen AI into the workflow. Santiago tells me how AI has supercharged what his team can create. “The creative possibilities of AI and VP are endless,” he says – pointing out that even Disney’s The Mandalorian was filmed entirely using virtual production techniques.
Now, agency creatives no longer have to dismiss outlandish ideas because of location or budget constraints. If a script calls for a scene on Mars or Saturn, so be it. “Now, almost everything is completely possible,” he says.
Gen AI tools come into play by helping create some of those fantastical environments quickly and convincingly. For example, Santiago’s team can generate photorealistic virtual backdrops using AI rather than sending a crew to capture plates on location. In their demo reel, one shot shows a woman standing on a small patch of sand in the studio, which AI then expanded into a sweeping 300-metre desert vista in post-production.
Initially, they only used AI to generate backgrounds, but then “we saw that expansions can be made once filmed in VP,” he explains, meaning they can film a modest set and let AI paint the grand scenery beyond it. Santiago is deliberate about keeping the human at the centre of all this technology. While AI might build worlds and VP might render them on LED screens, the ideas still spring from real people. “Even if the result is generated by AI or humans integrated into VP, the ideas are still human… And what makes the difference is creative talent,” he stresses. In fact, using these tools has shifted some aspects of production from post to pre: the team spends more time up front building 3D models and training AI on style frames so that by the time the cameras roll, much of the magic is ready to go. It’s a different way of working, but one that ensures technology serves the creative vision, not the other way around.
Beyond speed and creativity, virtual production is delivering major green benefits for Hogarth Spain and its clients. Sustainability is top of mind for Santiago, especially with WPP (Hogarth’s parent company) pushing an aggressive carbon reduction commitment for 2030.
Traditional film shoots can be resource-intensive – flying crews to multiple locations, trucking equipment, powering lights with generators – it all adds up. Virtual production slashes that by keeping shoots local and digital. “In the examples we’ve seen from VP, we never achieve less than 80% savings [in carbon footprint],” Santiago reports. Many projects hit even higher marks: “We’ve even reached 92–93%.”
The biggest factor is simply less travel – fewer people and gear moving around means a dramatically smaller carbon footprint by default. Even smaller optimisations (like using solar energy on set or electric vehicles) can only cut so much, maybe 40% at best, he says.
A Team That Plays to Win
Keeping pace with such rapid change requires a special kind of team – one that learns fast and experiments fearlessly. Fortunately, that’s exactly the culture Santiago has cultivated.
“We’ve always had a deeply playful team,” he says proudly. While formal training courses help everyone grasp the basics, the real leaps have come from sandbox-style tinkering. “The real innovation comes from playful experimentation and a willingness to push the boundaries,” Santiago adds.
Ask him about R&D highlights, and he’ll reel off a few that sound almost like film plots themselves. In Hogarth’s compact Madrid VP studio, they once put an actress on a treadmill and rolled a panoramic LED background behind her – creating the illusion of a 5 km stroll down a city street, even though the physical studio is only 6 m wide.
In another test, they layered rainfall in three stages (virtual rain on the LED screens, real water on set, and extra rain in post) to perfectly simulate a downpour on camera. The team’s internal competitions have become the stuff of legend: Santiago laughs as he recounts challenging his crew to do a complete scene change – new background, set pieces, lighting and all – as fast as possible. “The record? 25 seconds!” he tells me.
That particular stunt, he notes, was “all in the name of playful testing”, but it speaks volumes about the team’s hands-on ethos. They approach VP tech not with trepidation, but with the curiosity of kids in a sandbox, poking every button to see what new trick might be possible.
This experimental spirit has paid off in more than just tech breakthroughs – it’s created a buzz within the studio. “From a human point of view, I find it most rewarding to see how the teams are passionate and having fun with the tech,” Santiago says.
After pushing through early sceptics and unknowns, Santiago’s outlook on virtual production is decidedly optimistic. He believes we’re only seeing the beginning of VP’s impact. As the technology matures, he predicts virtual production could handle “at least 30% of production” in the near future – and “with ongoing advancements in AI, that figure could easily rise to 80% or more”.
But he’s the first to admit that forecasting even five years out might be a fool’s errand in such a fast-moving field. “Things are moving so fast that what happens in just five months is already impressive enough.”
Rather than worry about distant possibilities, he focuses on fostering that culture of curiosity and courage in his team and clients. His advice to the industry at large is to dive in and start exploring. “I encourage everyone to embrace VP and AI without fear, to explore new possibilities, to play, and to look to the future with hope.” These technologies, in his view, will “expand opportunities within the creative industry, not diminish them”.
If certain production tasks get automated or “replace” some old ways of working, so be it – “it simply frees us to dedicate our time and energy to where we can make a real difference,” Santiago notes, ever pragmatic. In the end, the heart of Hogarth Spain’s VP rise isn’t only about the technology itself, but the creative people using it to “build something extraordinary together”.
