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6 cgw s u m m e r 2 0 1 9 Los Angeles to design and implement a new generation of on-set tools. "The Jungle Book was Version 1.0 of this approach to filmmaking," Legato says. "We skipped over 2.0. The Lion King is Version 3.0. We previs'd the entire movie in VR and then shot it in VR as if it were a live-action film." VIRTUAL FILMMAKING The Unity-powered tools allowed several people to be in one virtual world together. MPC and Magnopus artists and pro- grammers viewed the world through Oculus headsets. Legato, Favreau, Valdez, James Chinlund (production designer), Caleb Deschanel (cinematographer), and some- times others could view a VR environment simultaneously through HTC Vives. "It was a little weird," Legato says. "You could see someone walking 100 yards away in the environment, but they were standing 5 feet away. You could click on their monitor and instantly transport to their location and explore. If I wanted everyone to see what I saw, they could look through my camera from my vantage point." This was true whether they were scouting locations, blocking animation, or shooting the film in VR. Jones provides an example of how that worked for the opening Circle of Life sequence. Scar, the villainous lion voiced by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is in a cave when we first meet him. "Mufasa gives him a little flak," says Jones, referring to Scar's brother, the king of the Pride Lands voiced by James Earl Jones. "At one point, we had Scar exiting through a back entrance of the cave, but Jon [Favreau] thought it might be better to have him come out the front. Jon made that decision while looking at the scene in VR." So, still in VR, Jones moved the lion into the new position, and Deschanel framed a new shot. To make that possible, Ferrara's team modeled and rendered digital sets at a res- olution appropriate for real-time interaction. The sets provided locations to scout and surfaces on which animators could place animals. A group of animators under Jones' direction created previs-quality animation for the VR shoot. Actors voicing the charac- ters were recorded. "Basically, we do a location scout, and once we figure out where things go, it starts a whole series of things," Legato says. "We might send the location back to the art department to make a bigger hill, and meantime, the animators are creating the action where it will play. Then, the scenes come back to the camera stage to be photographed. We have recorded tracks of the dialog but sometimes use temp tracks – it's free-flowing. As we're shooting, Jon might be recording the actors. It's like we're creating a stage play and then we shoot it. We add the camera moves and do all the things we'd do for a live-action movie. We shoot assets and animation as if it were a live movie. What we're photographing is not photoreal, but it feels so because we can walk around, take a step." In addition to powering a 360-degree view of the location with animated animals, the game engine could render shadows and the reflectance of bounce light. Deschanel could move lights within the scene. AFRICA Before any sets were built or animals ani- mated, in March 2017, supervisors Ferrara, Jones, Legato, and Valdez, along with Production Designer Chinlund and Director of Photography Deschanel, spent two weeks in Kenya. "It was an incredible opportunity to see filmmakers in their element," Ferrara says. "To see what type of things they liked. When we returned, James [Chinlund] made a selection of locations he liked, and I put together an itinerary with an MPC team to photograph those locations." As a result, environment artists had a library of more than 240,000 photographs and 7,000 videos to reference for the envi- ronments. Animators had a total of 42 hours 53 minutes of reference footage captured in the Serengeti, from a trip to Disney's Animal Kingdom in Orlando, Florida, and from na- ture documentaries. "We built 66 digital sets, which is fewer than Jungle Book, but they were so much bigger," Ferrara says. "We have miles and miles and miles of vista for the savanna, and we have no matte paintings. When you have only a few trees, you can tell if you're dupli- cating trees. So, every tree is CG, even if it's 150 kilometers in the distance. And then we have the opposite. When the camera is fo- cused on a lion cub's tail, we're at grass level MOVING CLOUDS AND CHANGES IN LIGHTING HELPED ENLIVEN AN ENVIRONMENT THAT WAS OFTEN ONE-THIRD LAND AND TWO-THIRDS SKY.