Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1097515
DGA QUARTERLY 29 Caleb would prelight for a long time, and he's never been involved with any technology… C: But lighting's lighting. I think it's healthy to have somebody who understands real- world lighting coming into a virtual world and approaching it as they would photo- graphically. Old-School Tropes in a New-School Paradigm F: And so you had all the tech people who didn't necessarily understand filmmaking that much, and you had the film people who didn't understand tech. And by joining them together, what we ended up doing was inheriting a hundred years of cinema tradition through the people who it's been handed down to through apprenticeship or school. We were just building on what you did with Avatar, and [applying that to] Jungle Book. And a lot of the same people you had trained were working with me. C: Bob Legato and (animation supervisor) Andy Jones—yeah. F: That whole crew. But then you have to explain to them, "You can't just walk over and move something" [on the set]. I find with a lot of new technologies, it doesn't just disrupt the technology, it also disrupts the culture. And I tried to maintain that culture on set. C: It actually creates a new culture. The thing is we're in a merged state between the cinematic paradigm of cameras and cranes and Steadicams and all that sort of thing, and the VR paradigm, which is just the CG camera, which can go through the eye of a needle and rocket up to the top of the Em- pire State Building. And what I find is that the Steadicam and the dolly and the crane that you are physically using on set—see, I rejected all that 12 years ago—and said, "I'm going to keep it in my mind." Because I've worked with all those tools and I know them. But where I think that can be super-important is if somebody's coming into it that never worked with all those tools, and if they just start flying the camera around, it becomes weightless and massless, and you get these impossible angles. What I have is a top A-camera operator— a camera operator who's also a Steadicam operator, and he works with me. So I do the gestural camera. He says, "What was that?" And I say, "Well, that was a technocrane, and I was pushing out with the stick and then I rose up and I came over here." And then he'll refine the movement I did— smooth out the base-move but free up the rotation, so it can still have a little bit of a wheels feel. F: Well, we took it a step further in this case, with limitations, because we felt we had to make a case for (The Lion King) feel- ing live action, which was the goal. Because if it felt animated, it would have been redundant with the (Disney animated fea- ture) from '94. So with a title that still holds up like that, you have to create something that feels like a completely new medium. And so part of the way we accomplish that is not just saying, "Apply the limitations of the crane," but actually having a dolly grip working, or a grip working the crane arm, and somebody else working the pickle and somebody else working the wheels. C: So many liberties are taken with CG lighting. But to really get it right, you need a first-unit, top DP to come in. Maybe they don't know anything about the damn CG lighting tools, but lighting is lighting. A