Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1097515
DGA QUARTERLY 31 PHOTOS: PHOTOFEST Favreau, near left, with his Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr.; below, with lead actor Neel Sethi, while film- ing The Jungle Book. figure out what we were going to interact with. C: Like the Techvis. F: Like the Techvis, much like you were doing capture on Avatar, which is kind of where I learned it. And so we would do full motion capture, first on Jungle Book, and then we would build little cookie-cutter sets that would integrate into the green-screen extension of the set. And so we learned how to provide for what you need to interact with, which isn't that different from what they did in The Wizard of Oz. They would figure out where the yellow brick road was and how much they needed to actually build. And so even on what's a "practical film shoot," like a Marvel movie, there's still a green screen back there. So you have to plan ahead of time what you're going to interact with and where the light's coming from. Since I wrote most of [The Mandalorian], I wrote it to fit within our volume, and in trying to keep the scale of it like the first Star Wars film, which was a relatively low- budget affair, even though the effects were spectacular. And so we tried to bring that aesthetic into this because it actually paired up quite well with these techniques. C: That's fantastic. It's been a while for me being on a live-action set. I'm going to be doing live action in May in New Zealand. And it's a lot of hard-surface sets, but we have some jungle stuff as well. And we're mixing capture, or captured performances, with live action. And so the biggest thing I've found was problematic when we did it before was eyelines. If you're capping CG against CG, you can always adjust the eyelines slightly in animation later. But if your eyeline gets baked in when you have a photographic element, you've got to be hit- ting that right point… F: What was interesting (on The Jungle Book), especially working with a young ac- tor, we ended up with puppeteers, because a kid would look at a puppet and not at the face of the person reading. And then the puppeteer could also improvise and change things and adjust. C: Puppets are great; I love puppets. F: So for that application with one character, it's good. But if you have a group of characters looking, you have to have ev- erybody look at the same place. And I know they've been trying to mess around that with Simulcam or having two different sets. C: We did a lot of capture. We've got an- other problem too, which is we've got char- acters in different scales that are played by humans that are the same size. So I've got humans and now the Avatars. So we've got two adjacent sets in the same volume. On one I'll have a kid who's supposed to be a human kid, but he's acting to his Na'vi friend, a Na'vi teenager. F: Simultaneously? C: Simultaneously. So we've got a puppe- teer who's got the Na'vi form, and he does the arms and the hand touches and all that, and so we're capping him against the other guy over there. They've gotten so good that we actually were able to have it sync perfectly. And we used little people. F: For the other set. C: For the human scale relative to the other performers. And it worked beautifully. And we have a stock troupe of actors that worked with us for about 16 months. I think the eyelines and giving something to the actors is still the most important thing. You know, the tech can solve any problem, but it can't solve an emotional problem for the actor. Creating a Comfort Zone for Actors C: I think the more technical the film is, the more important it is for the director to get all the tech out of the way; to sit down on an apple box with the actors and talk to them about the emotional throughline of