DRAMA | THE L ION K I NG
NOTHING BETTER THAN THE REAL THING? MPC’s animation aimed for the most realistic effect; but real filmmaking tools were needed to help this virtual production achieve greatness
WORDS JULI AN M ITCHELL, DISNEY / PICTURES DISNEY
T here was the movie Babe , with real actors, then Disney’s Jungle Book turned the tables and reduced the human count to just one child in a photorealistic jungle world. Now, with The Lion King , we have everything as real as the computer technology can muster circa 2017-2019 and the animals are still talking (and singing). So realistically in fact, that one of the film’s VFX Supervisors mistook a render for a still from Kenya where the crew spent some time referencing the real world before any virtual production started. Where do we go from here? It’s only going to get more realistic. At least when all the real lions have gone, we’ll have a memory of them singing and having fun. For us, the interest is the element that’s been added to the new production of The Lion King , the virtual side, taking keyframe animation and handing it over to the acquisition experts to ‘real’ it up. The term ‘virtual production’ is a catch-all phrase, but this movie is perhaps closest to the true meaning; when it strove for photoreality it knew that cinematography had to be a major animals talking with animated mouths. There was Avatar, with a few motion- captured aliens mixing it with real
part of the capture, and that people who shoot the real world for a living had to be involved. MARCH OF THE 600 Elliot Newman is a VFX Supervisor at MPC in London who had the job of animating The Lion King . After spending two years of his life working on the movie, he was in the mood for reflecting on this huge endeavour. “You do end up in a bubble and you can’t see it any more, but now is a good time to look back at how it was done. For instance, the virtual production aspect was something that was totally new to us but the scale of it is impressive. There were no plates, it was all CG so the closest thing to it was The Jungle Book – but it was still a different beast really. There were practices that we had refined since then; like how we broke down the sequences within the company, how review iterations worked and how we presented the work back to Disney.” 15 years ago MPC was just a couple of floors; for The Lion King , more than 600 people touched the movie for the company at some point. “There were plenty of people coming in and out while the movie was in production depending on what skills
22 DEF I N I T ION | SEPTEMBER 20 1 9
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