Dark Slope

Dark Slope operates at the intersection of entertainment and technology, providing virtual production services and creating immersive content. Established in 2018 in Toronto, Canada, the company was co-founded by Raja Khanna, Dan Fill, CJ Hervey, and Ben Unsworth. The founding team brings extensive experience from the media, technology, and gaming sectors; Khanna previously served as CEO for TV & Digital at Blue Ant Media, while Fill held executive roles at Decode Entertainment and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Initially focused on location-based VR entertainment, the company has strategically pivoted to meet market shifts, expanding first into animated television production and later into live-action virtual production.

The company's business model is multifaceted, generating revenue through several streams. A primary offering is its 35,000-square-foot virtual production studio in Toronto, which features one of the largest LED volumes in North America. This facility provides a turnkey solution for film and television producers, enabling them to create diverse digital environments efficiently, reducing the constraints of physical locations and weather. Dark Slope serves production companies and studios, offering its space and technical expertise for creating content across genres, from scripted drama to reality TV. The company also acts as a co-producer and investor, recently launching a $1 million fund to support Canadian film and television projects that utilize its virtual production capabilities.

Beyond studio services, Dark Slope develops and produces its own original intellectual property, including television series and immersive games for at-home and location-based entertainment platforms. Their initial success came from warehouse-scale VR games like "Scarygirl Mission Maybee," distributed through partners such as Zero Latency. A significant corporate milestone was the 2021 launch of Lumeto Inc., a spin-off company incubated within Dark Slope. Lumeto leverages the core spatial technology to offer an immersive learning and training platform, InvolveXR, primarily for the healthcare and public safety sectors, demonstrating the versatile application of the firm's technology.

Keywords: virtual production, LED volume, immersive entertainment, motion capture, real-time rendering, Unreal Engine, location-based entertainment, VR games, spatial computing, television production, film production, content creation, digital environments, augmented reality, mixed reality, production studio, sound stages, media technology, animation, virtual reality training