The Educational Day of the VP Gathering will take place on April 14, 2026, at Breda University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands; this edition, aligned with the theme “Leaders of the Craft”, is designed for educators and academic professionals in media, arts, games, entertainment, and programming who are shaping the next generation of Virtual Production talent.
The day will feature a live demonstration on our VP stage, focusing on the practical methods, workflows, and craft leadership skills that should be embedded in contemporary VP education.
Attendees will participate in panel discussions examining the realities of building and running VP facilities within higher education, exploring best practices, curriculum design, operational challenges, and the pedagogical approaches needed to develop future leaders of the craft.
Throughout the day, a VP Marketplace will be active providing educators with the opportunity to meet key vendors, discover new tools and solutions, and explore how industry technology can be effectively integrated into academic programs.
Students of entertainment technology enter the industry with advanced skills, but limited exposure to production culture. Meanwhile seasoned professional know the work environment but need to find time to up-skill. This session looks at mentorship as the missing link between learning, practice and knowledge sharing. We’ll explore how experienced practitioners serve as process guides, and new talent brings fresh perspectives on workflow. This continuous exchange advances production fluency and builds sustainable careers as VP technology continues to advance.
This presentation will showcase a long-term strategy of implementing VP curricula over years, resulting in the development of a Ministry-approved Virtual Production Graduate Certificate program at Humber Polytechnic in Toronto, Canada. This talk addresses real-time pipelines, Technical R&D and innovative production workflows. In an age where rapid changes are impacting the film/media industry, institutions grapple with the need to respond in order to best prepare students. In the case of Virtual Production, early adopters lead the way in public post-secondary institutions, by integrating changes not in a ‘straight forward’ manner, but through iterative and dynamic steps.
Portals/Traces develops a shared AI/VP/XR infrastructure linking AUT with partners across Aotearoa New Zealand, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific to enable real-time, culturally grounded VP collaboration. Moving beyond technical interoperability, the project tests how distributed studios can function as a single, ethically responsive creative ecosystem – integrating motion capture, photogrammetry, textiles, and AI-driven environments – to support sustainable and transcultural storytelling. This presentation reflects on the infrastructural, aesthetic, and decolonial implications of connecting VP sites as “portals,” where traces of place, culture, and authorship persist within shared real-time worlds.
Virtual Production is redefining how stories are told, but how we train people for real-time workflows is still evolving. This presentation takes a deep look into how Virtual Production is currently being taught globally, where education is succeeding, and where it struggles to keep pace with industry needs. Drawing on industry insights, we’ll cover what studios expect from new talent, how to bridge the gap between learning environments and production, and look beyond traditional film and television workflows as Virtual Production expands into industries like architectural visualization, theatre, and immersive experiences.
This roundtable brings together recent graduates from various virtual production programs across different schools, universities and countries. They will share how they approached their transition into the industry, the choices that shaped their early careers and the challenges they faced when finding work. The discussion will also highlight what aspects of their training genuinely supported their professional entry and what could be improved. The goal is both to help teaching teams reflect on how to strengthen their curricula and to offer current students a clearer sense of what the professional world can look like. It also gives recent graduates an opportunity to compare experiences and provides studios and employers with insights into how to better support and recruit new talent.
What if you could place real performances into cinematic sci-fi worlds without a green screen, LED walls, or massive budgets? This talk breaks down a practical filmmaking workflow that uses AI compositing and virtual production techniques to integrate actors shot against simple white walls into fully realized science-fiction environments. This workflow is developed through hands-on R&D and tested on a recently directed short film.
The challenges and learnings of creating a pole dance performance in a Virtual Production environment.
Abstract coming coon…
Live demonstrations at the VP stage give attendees a practical, behind-the-scenes look at real-time virtual production workflows on a working stage, showcasing how teams capture, light, and iterate from camera to final pixels.
The networking lunch is a dedicated, informal moment to meet speakers, partners, and fellow attendees, and to turn conversations into practical connections for future collaborations.
The VP Marketplace is a dedicated space where leading VP vendors and service providers showcase their latest tools, technologies, and workflows. It offers attendees direct access to hardware, software, and expertise shaping current and future VP pipelines.
For the first time, we are using the B2Match matchmaking platform to help attendees schedule targeted business meet-and-greets in advance and arrive with a pre-built meeting calendar.
