Tampa film, video production firm grabs spotlight thanks to work on Nic Cage film

Vū Technologies, a fast-growing, Tampa-based company that specializes in virtual production technology for TV and movie shoots, is riding high thanks to its contributions to Sympathy for the Devil, a new psychological thriller starring Nicholas Cage and Joel Kinnaman that debuted last month at the Toronto International Film Festival.

According to a news release, about half of the feature-length film was shot at Vū’s 40,000 square-foot virtual production studio in Las Vegas. The high-tech space provides next-generation content rendering capabilities via photo-realistic virtual environments in a LED studio, as opposed to production crews having to film on location, which significantly cuts the costs and time required to shoot a movie.

“This studio is gorgeous,” states Cage, the star of hit films such as Moonstruck, Raising Arizona, Face/Off and The Rock, in the release. “It’s state-of-the-art.”

Vū’s capabilities, the release states, also allow film crews to capture higher-quality footage at a fraction of the costs associated with traditional, on-location shooting.

“We wouldn’t be able to do this film without this amazing LED setup,” Sympathy for the Devil Director Yuval Adler states in the release, “in this short of time and with this budget.”

Vū CEO Tim Moore and Jason Soto, general manager of the firm’s Las Vegas studio, served as executive producers of Sympathy for the Devil.

“Typically, a feature film shoots an average of three to five pages of script per day when filming on location; however, when shooting in virtual production, we’ve seen several productions triple that output at Vū,” Moore states in the release. “This makes a huge difference for the production timeline and budget.”

Sympathy for the Devil does not yet have a specific U.S. release date but is expected to hit theaters in 2023, according to IMDB.com.