Wagner James Au / New World Notes

If you've seen the hit movie Kingsman, you'll remember the amazingly choreographed church gunfight between dozens of combatants which plays out in a single, deranged take. (Watch here.) Now watch a segment of that scene recreated in VRChat with eleven people in real time, wearing Star Wars-themed avatars. ("I promised the person who was leading it as our MC that we'd make it Star Wars themed for Star Wars day," the director explains to me.)

It's hard for me to process how impressive this is. To shoot it, each of these eleven players had to log in from around the world, perform separately in full-body VR rigs, and somehow, while hundreds or thousands of miles apart, still coordinate this group choreography that requires split second timing.

The director is "Legend50210" (let's call him Legend for short), who back in 2022, created and starred in this cool machinima shot in VRChat, with the fight scenes recorded in a full VR rig. Since then, Legend has continued building on his practice to turn VRChat into a platform for making machinima — and has also turned his SYNC Studios into a VRChat community of like-minded players/machinma makers:

In action scenes they shoot, he explains, "we are outlining positions for each actor to move and we articulate to them how they are meant to move since they cannot see these interactions in real-time. Invisible to the camera, we make use of a 3D pen with the ability to shift colors that we can assign to different people with different meanings depending on what we want and need in the moment. Our actors have these lines as visual guidance while they are acting and listening to their auditory guidance we call 'AudioScripts'.

"We have been developing this method of Low Latency Choreography in VRChat for well over a year and a half and we’re still finding more ways to excel with it."

With the Kingsman scene, the ten supporting players have one-three references to act out, while the lead MC has to perform many multiple references which sync up with them.

SYNC Studios works with VRChat players performing together across Australia, Singapore, the Philippines, the EU and North America. And despite these regions being thousands of miles apart, Legend says they're still able to shoot their group scenes in real time:

"We have been so successful in our results that we have yet to encounter a combination of people with stable ping where our process has yet to work… we can work with anyone who has a stable internet connection, which in a VR space online, is relatively almost everybody. The only exceptions are just people who have shaky WiFi.

"All it takes is ambition with us."

Here's a compilation video of what Legend and his community have already shot so far (watch above); expect even more ambitious shoots soon.

And yes, they're looking for more collaborators, and even have a "Dojo" to teach newcomers their combat techniques. If you'd like to be part of the future mayhem, join the SYNC Studios Dojo Discord server here.