DRAMA | THE L ION K I NG
walking away thinking, ‘that was an ugly shot’. We certainly made sure that there was a craft to the shots, not just scientifically going with values that made sense. “We kept everything as grounded in reality as possible. For instance, if Simba is walking into a cave, behind him in the savannah it would probably be bright sunlight and be very blown out. So you’re struggling to expose for the interior of the cave. We could have thrown lots of lights into the cave and added extra bounce and kicker lights with maybe rim lights around everything, and exposed it all that so it was compensating for the background so it didn’t blow out. But as soon as you do that you start entering the fantasy realm again and I think that’s part of why the movie looks the way it looks. Yes, it’s pretty but it’s not pushed, it doesn’t have that ‘overworked’ look.” It’s to the VFX world’s great credit that this reach for photorealism saw them also reaching out to the cinematography world. Deschanel actually shot the movie with his hands on the camera and with all the nuances that his experience has given him, in fact Newman thinks that this marriage of CG and traditional acquisition might have created a new genre. “There is a new genre that potentially will come out of this which is quite exciting for us. This is brand new technology and since The Lion King the technology we’re using for the virtual shoots has evolved even more. We’re already on a completely new revision of those tools and more and more filmmakers are interested in using them and it’s definitely exciting. Even if you have a project that you want to shoot on a plate and add a visual effect character
Jon Favreau has said that The Lion King could have been completed without the input from a film crew
to it, these tools will help you visualise those things as opposed to visual effects just being considered a post process.” PROCESS TOO FAR? Director Jon Favreau has said that The Lion King could have been completed without the input from a film crew, indeed it would have been cheaper to go that way. But what would be the difference between an all-VFX crew and a traditional filmmaking crew being involved? Luckily as the film
sails past the half-a-billion-dollar mark in ticket sales it’s not a pressing question. “The virtual production helps introduce very experienced filmmakers to the process rather than seeing all this in an animated movie,” Newman says. “You can bring a crew in that’s experienced at filmmaking and introduce them to a new set of tools and actually shoot the movie. It’s going to be pre-visualised in a real-time game engine and you will be able to use a camera and put some lights in as if you’re there on
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