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 That was the challenge a visual effects team of more than 1,000
people faced when working on Disney's "The Lion King" remake of
the 1994 animation, aiming to bring to life the much-loved
characters, Mufasa and Simba, against a stunning but fake
African savannah backdrop.
Last year's second biggest grossing film, with global cinema
takings of $1.6 billion according to tracking firm Box Office
Mojo, "The Lion King" received a widely-expected visual effects
Oscar nomination on Monday for its "photo real" digital imagery
that makes it look like a wildlife documentary.
A mammoth team worked on the Jon Favreau-directed movie,
produced with computer animation, virtual reality, gaming
technology and live-action methods. Visual effects company MPC,
owned by technology and entertainment company Technicolor and
with studios around the globe, was tasked with making the tale
of lion cub Simba look like it had actually been filmed with
real animals in Africa.
"One of the biggest things you're responsible for is breathing
life into these characters ... They have to behave real and they
have to look real," Adam Valdez, MPC visual effects supervisor
who spent two and a half years working on "The Lion King", told
Reuters in London.
"And if the two things are ever out of whack with each other, it
breaks the movie."
Valdez, who won an Oscar for Favreau's Disney remake of "The
Jungle Book", traveled to Kenya for research.
"We do a lot of painstaking research into how real animals move,
how their muscles and skin behave ... and then in the computer,
we recreate all these things," he said, adding the MPC team
first created designs of the characters and landscape.
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"An artist, like an animator, has to sit down and actually hand
animate that eye, hand animate that face so that every little subtle
nuance is represented."
Work on the movie took place in London, Bangalore and Los Angeles,
where a headset-wearing Favreau and his team worked on a virtual
reality set, using gaming technology to direct the scenes.
"The game ... that we wrote was about people walking around the
savannah of Africa," Valdez said.
"Instead of holding a game weapon they're holding a camera, and
they're able to point the camera at the things they want to film and
we're recording all this information in the computer."
Valdez said each shot was then carefully recreated to make it look
as realistic as possible.
The team used recordings of the cast, which included Beyonce and
Donald Glover, voicing their roles for scenes with dialogue.
"We were very subtle with it ... Every tiny adjustment to say just
how much eyes open or close, how much eye whites you see on the
inside or outside of the irises, they all have an emotional meaning
for us as humans," Valdez said.
"But if ... you push it, you snap the connection of the photo
realism of the image that you're seeing with behavior that is of a
different sort ... It was a very tricky thing."
(Reporting by Sarah Mills; Writing by Marie-Louise Gumuchian;
editing by Diane Craft)
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