Keeping it real

Painstaking efforts went into effects

LONDON How do you make a computer-generated lion, warthog and hyena look real while singing and talking at the same time?

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 muchloved characters including Mufasa and Simba against a stunning but fake African savanna backdrop.

Last year’s second-biggest-grossing film, with global cinema takings of $1.6 billion according to tracking firm Box Office Mojo (Avengers: Endgame topped the list at $2.8 billion, all figures in U.S. dollars), The Lion King has received a widely expected Oscar nomination in visual effects 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, 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,” said Adam Valdez, MPC visual effects supervisor who spent two and a half years working on The Lion King.

“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, travelled 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 re-create all these things,” he said.

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 savanna 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 re-created to make it look as realistic as possible. The team used recordings of the cast voicing their roles for scenes with dialogue.

“We were very subtle with it,” Valdez said. “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.”