DRAMA | THE L ION K I NG
MODELLED CAMERAS As in most things in the professional media world, audio got there first. Decades ago real instruments were modelled through samplers like Fairlight and now are commonplace in the industry and even in apps on your smartphone. Virtual production is now doing the same for the real instruments of our industry. Look on IMDb and it will say that The Lion King used the Arri Alexa 65 to shoot the movie; obviously it didn’t, but the crew did take the cameras to Kenya to shoot reference shots that they could emulate for the animation. “There was a location shoot in Kenya that Deschanel went on,” says Newman. “This gave us some Deschanel photography we could all look at so we could learn his sensibilities and style – how does he like shooting things, what lens choices does it have? But it was also a great Alexa 65 reference for us, very rich and detailed and meant for us to try and capture the essence of the plates we got from it. “From that we said that we would just base the movie on that camera so the virtual camera that Deschanel was operating was based around the same Alexa 65 sensor with the same measurements, so we knew that
we had to match the same field of view as the camera had achieved with a particular lens. In post-production we would also simulate the correct depth-of-field, it might be a T2.8 shot so that would be the depth- of-field on that virtual lens for instance. “We also did a calibration shoot of the Alexa 65 as well so we mapped its noise characteristics, dynamic range, the quality of the lenses, bokeh and so on. Even though it was rendered we did our best to make it feel it was shot on a 65 which was our reference camera.” The team also went to Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Florida and the instruction from director Favreau was not to put any animals into a scanning or a photo booth. “He never wanted that to be a part of the making of this movie; everything we captured from real life we did from a distance with long lenses. We were able to take a slightly more technical approach with the Animal Kingdom because it’s obviously a park where we had safe distances to set up multiple cameras with multiple vantage points to study the animals. It’s always better to work from real references and it’s always more successful as there are so many semi-nuances available in real life.
We would base the movie around the Arri Alexa 65 camera sensor so we knew we had to match it
600 Number of people who worked on the movie at MPC London 1 BILLION Worldwide ticket receipts two weeks after release
26 DEF I N I T ION | SEPTEMBER 20 1 9
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