I was able to attend the London ACM Siggraph presentation that Elliot Newman (VFX Supervisor) from MPC did on the ‘VFX of The Lion King.’ Elliot was able to provide insights of the scope of the production from Virtual Production all towards Editorial.

Most of the developments stemmed from the advancements made throughout the production of Jungle Book which redefined the worlds created in the realm of visual effects. The challenges for this production definitely to push the boundaries that have been set from the get-go to get the

Virtual Production

Building up a computer-generated (CG) world full of characters and environment that interact with each other requires being able to frame and visualise the way the virtual camera is positioned in 3D space. Using the virtual reality (VR) technologies that MPC and Magnopus to allow the directors and cinematographers to get a glimpse of the shots will look like in a “virtual stage” loaded with previs level environment and character assets that were built in Maya and building the scene setup in Unity game engine. This setup was used for set/location scouting in 3D space as a building block that replicated how the physical camera moves and be able to alter set objects.

Kenya Research Trip & Technical Shoot

A lot of research and data acquisition that enabled the photo realistic documentary design style. The data collated involved photogrammetry, trees, foliage, plants, rocks, terrains, skies, HDRIs and lighting.

Another shoot that uses multi cameras to capture the performance of the animal movement that can be used as a reference for animation, skin sliding and other deformations.

Lighting

The usual HDRI workflow revolved around capturing different High Dynamic Range Imaging Image Based Lighting