How The Lion King Was Made In Virtual Reality (VR)

In terms of film making techniques, The Lion King is the first of its kind. It’s the first film ever to be made on a virtual reality set. Director Jon Favreau, whose experience with Marvel’s Iron Man films as well as 2016’s The Jungle Book, have heightened his knowledge and status to be able to undertake the new direction of the much beloved Disney classic.

In its current form, VR exists as mostly a service to video games with players being able to put on a headset that instantly places them in the virtual environment. They can see, hear and interact with their surroundings. A technology that has now been applied to the movie making process.

It’s huge pressure to re-create something that is so treasured by many, with music and imagery that in itself, has become iconic. “On entering into Lion King, inheriting all that I learned on Jungle Book, there was a tremendous opportunity to retell the story using a new set of tools and a new technology” says Favreau.

Unlike the original 1994 version, where the animation is done by hand, the technology now exists to be able to virtually create environments such as Pride Rock where film makers can create the landscape, control time of day and place their characters as they see fit in order to shoot a scene. As Favreau described himself, “…this is done in a game engine, we’re using Unity, so really what we’re doing here is building a multiplayer VR film making game.”

Although the film is often referred to as ‘live action’ the term would only apply in the sense that it looks extremely life-like, despite being computer generated, all besides “one shot” Favreau has confirmed. Location scouting was done for production purposes but what you see on screen, from the scenery to incredible looking wildlife, was all virtually designed.

Oscar winning Visual Effects Supervisor Rob Legato who worked on Titanic, Avatar & The Jungle Book alongside Favreau, has helped to combine VR technology with cameras in order to film in the simulated environment. Wearing VR headsets, you “can walk into a scene and see the other actors and trees…and because you are in 3D, you get a realistic sense [of the environment].”

It’s an evolution of technology that has expanded upon previous milestones that include the production of James Cameron’s Avatar, where specially designed camera’s allowed actors wearing motion capture suits to be filmed inside digital backgrounds of the fictional Pandora in real time.

For most CGI performances in film and video games, actors are filmed through motion capture where the recording of their movements are used to animate the digital character models. For this movie however, no mocap was used and instead actors were filmed together in some scenes for the voice recording. Lines were cut together and then the animation of the characters designed based on their performances. This allowed room for improvisation and more natural relationships between the actors to their onscreen counterparts.

Considering the original animation and the success of the Broadway musical there is the challenge to be able to tell the same story not only in a way that’s new and fresh, but also appropriate to that medium. For the Broadway stage production, their unique interpretation was achieved by having actors in animal costumes symbolic of African heritage, combined with giant hollow puppets of some of the other wildlife.

In this modern take with photo-real looking animals, the challenge lies on how to tell a very human story despite the film not having any living thing in it. A film made on an artificial set can easily feel simulated as opposed to having live actors on set or on location, but Legato explains that "you shouldn't be aware that we were using a computer to make the movie. You have to treat it like a camera, and do no more … or it distracts you from the story. I don’t want to make a visual effects extravaganza; I want to make a movie”.

The technologies and use of VR in The Lion King will only further pave the way for movies to come in future where film makers have the ability to create their worlds in virtual environments and us as audiences are invited to view just what that technology can achieve.

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