A bold new chapter in Northern Ireland’s production landscape begins this week with the official opening of Studio Ulster—a state-of-the-art virtual production facility designed to compete on a global stage and unlock storytelling once considered out of reach.

Backed by a partnership between Belfast Harbour, Ulster University, and NI Screen, the $91 million (£72 million) facility boasts more than 75,000 square feet of production space, including cutting-edge LED volume stages, motion capture zones, and CGI-integrated workflows that promise to make “the impossible possible.” About a third of the funding comes from the Belfast Region City Deal, underscoring the government’s bet on film and high-tech content as a growth engine.

Set beside Belfast Harbour Studios—home to previous shoots like The School for Good and Evil (Netflix) and HBO’s Game of Thrones—Studio Ulster positions Northern Ireland to court a new generation of high-end productions. Among the first to book the space is a BBC series produced by Stellify Media that will re-create the sinking of the Titanic in real time using advanced virtual tools and first-person survivor accounts.

“This facility allows us to create Morocco at magic hour and shoot in that light for 12 hours straight—without ever leaving Belfast,” said Professor Declan Keeney, who leads Ulster University’s team managing the project. “We’re now in a position to greenlight productions that wouldn’t have been logistically or financially possible here just a few years ago.”

Virtual production—pioneered by The Mandalorian and now spreading rapidly across Europe and North America—offers producers a way to reduce location costs, condense schedules, and experiment creatively. The new facility’s goal is twofold: attract major tentpole projects and build a workforce pipeline of Northern Irish students trained in emerging on-set technologies like Unreal Engine and volumetric capture.

Studio Ulster also arrives at a pivotal moment for the global industry, as studios and streamers seek cost-effective ways to produce premium content in the face of economic pressures. As soundstage utilization in traditional hubs like Los Angeles has fallen—63% in 2024, down from 95% in 2018—regions like Belfast are seizing the moment to scale up.

Northern Ireland, already a proven backdrop for epic storytelling, is now banking on advanced infrastructure to cement its place on the production map. And with Studio Ulster, it may have just landed its most powerful calling card yet.