You have to find a way of recreating those on a virtual stage.” A live action movie is the sum total of the artistic choices of a director, a cinematographer, an editor and many more. You don’t make them frame by frame, you make them by looking at it and changing your mind, on the spur of the moment, in response to what is happening in front of you.

“That means there are creative choices that you make only in analogue. “Once the decision was taken to treat the movie as if it were live action it has to be filmed with a live action intent,” Legato explains to IBC365. Unlike The Jungle Book, where actor Neel Sethi (Mowgli) was composited into photoreal CG backgrounds with equally life-like animated animals, this time the entire film would be generated in a computer but shot with all the qualities of a David Attenborough nature documentary. They began discussing how the pipeline and methodology could continue to evolve from The Jungle Book to take their next project to yet another level. Indeed, for Technicolor-owned MPC, the story began as early as October 2016, while still wrapping up work on The Jungle Book campaign and months before Legato and Valdez won the Best VFX Oscar. It re-unites director Jon Favreau with the VFX team led by Legato and MPC VFX supervisor Adam Valdez. The Lion King, which will feature on the Big Screen at IBC2019 is, of course, Disney’s remake of its 1994 animated smash and also a follow-up to The Jungle Book. If you shortcut that, it no longer feels like a movie.” “You start with the actors, you block out the scene, you select the lens, you compose and light the shot. “You can’t improve on 100 years of filming,” says Rob Legato, the production’s VFX Supervisor.

Behind the scenes: Rendering The Lion Kingįor all its pioneering virtual production, the biggest breakthrough in The Lion King is its dedication to putting old fashioned filmmaking front and centre of the creative process.

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