Jon Favreau Explains How He Will Use VR to Develop THE LION KING
Director Jon Favreau wowed audiences with his feature film adaptation of Disney's animated classic The Jungle Book. The director is now set to recapture that magic with an adaptation of The Lion King, and this time he will be using VR technology to help in the development on the film. During an interview with Comingsoon, the director said:
“A lot of the simulcam and motion capture technology that we use here, a lot of it was innovated around the making of Avatar, and hasn’t really changed much, because there’s just not a lot of consumers. There are a lot of people who watch, but not a lot of people who use the technology. So we were finding ourselves building around technology that hadn’t changed a lot in the last 10 years. But now as we’re exploring what is being developed for VR, and game engine technology, a lot of that was used to some extent in Jungle Book, but as I look forward to developing this process further, there’s a lot over overlap.”
Favreau explained that he got into VR tech after working on a VR project called Gnomes and Goblins and watching an impressive demo for a project called The Blue, which is a virtual-reality blue whale encounter. He was really trying to figure out how to use VR in film development. When asked how the technology would be used in the creation of The Lion King, the director explained:
“Being able to scout–and some of this we were doing with ‘Jungle Book’ as well, but the ability to actually design an environment virtually, and then to walk around in it with your crew, doing a scout. And to be able set shots and to be able to choreograph movement, and move set pieces around before you do the heavy versions of it. Because there’s a lot of really light files, again, the processing is getting better and the coding is very specific to game engines now, so that the files remain light, so you can experience them in real time, so you can move assets around in real time, and start to rough in what you want to do as a filmmaker. And finally, when you deliver it to the point where you’re actually turning it over, and rendering the stuff in a very expensive, time-consuming way, you’ve already made all your creative decisions using technologies that are more geared towards gaming.”
Walking around in a digital CGI film environment with a crew of people and planning out your shots in this digital world? That sounds pretty damn cool! It looks like the development of The Jungle Book is going to take filmmaking tech to a whole new level! I can't wait to see what Favreau does with the film, and the "making of" featurettes are sure to be fascinating.