hi i'm john favreau i'm the director of the new disney's the lion king and this is vanity fair's notes on a scene [Music] i had just finished working on the jungle book for disney and i had learned so much about uh visual effects and and directing animation it occurred to me that you know we could really do something special with the movie the lion king spoke to the people of disney and pitch them on a vision of how we could present this in a way that felt more in the style of a documentary and is
essentially going to be like the jungle book except let's pull out the one human character and eliminate any need for photography or lights or real cameras and instead we photographed everything in vr and animated all of the performances with keyframe animation it was a a bit daunting because so many people have such a connection to the original film and i knew that there were certain areas that we had to stick very closely to what was there already it was different than jungle book because people know jungle book but they don't know jungle book they look
like they know lion king there's a whole generation that grew up watching lion king on a loop and it's an emotional film and we tend to remember emotional stories more than we remember stories that don't have that element what i tend to do is is prioritize the scenes that i remember the most so before i go back and watch the movie again i make a list of everything i remember from the movie and with jungle book there's probably about six things seven things i remembered from watching it younger but with lion king that list is
is there's pages long you know the circle of life you remember all those shots you remember the stampede you remember certain jokes you remember hakuna matata timon and pumbaa the trick is to make people feel like they saw the old movie when you show them a new one and if you show them the shots and the moments that they remember in lines of dialogue or songs it kind of checks the boxes in their mind and then you have actually a lot of latitude to depart from it when you get into areas that people don't remember
is clearly this particular sequence is almost shot for shot though here we have our cute little fella and in the old movie up here on the forehead there used to be like a fruit juice creating a little mark on his head but in nature that actual fruit is not filled with red paint and we chose to have pigment that comes from roots and that's how we have that little splash of color there we really put a lot of attention into the detail of the fur and much like a documentary we chose to make it appear
long lens because with documentaries often you can't get close enough to the subject and so as you see here's here's the subject in the foreground and the background is all blurry on shorter lens you can hold everything in focus but here you have to choose and so this is a a long lens shot so if you remember in the original movie when rafiki lifts up baby simba you have you know sort of plenty standing on and he stands up baby simba's here he holds him up with his arms but unfortunately the center of gravity uh
would not work in the way the anatomy is on our baboon friend rafiki here in a drawing it looks good but whenever we pose rafiki that way it always looks fake and physics is something that everybody's an expert in whether they realize it consciously or not it feels wrong to them so this is one of those where we want to make you think you see exactly what was in the old movie but actually the cut happens cleverly right as he gets lifted you get a little glimpse of it up here but it's obscured by the
edge of the rock so you never actually see that the center of gravity is off and then a lot of attention is paid on the framing so you get just enough to see it and you're out of it part of what makes the shot look so nice and this is what's so good about having somebody like caleb deschanel as your cinematographer is the lighting and backlight is something that works really well you'll see it used in really beautiful documentaries but also with visual effects it's a great way to help make something look photo real because
when something's backlit you kind of read into the details you know what you don't see your imagination fills in and it feels more real than it is i also want to point something out here you know we were able to pay tribute to a species that unfortunately during the course of making this we found out went extinct the northern white rhino and hopefully having these images so realistic and for kids to see it for the first time they may develop a relationship and feel a sense of responsibility to help protect this and the fact that
technology can make it look so photoreal it becomes harder and harder to make a case that you need to actually put animals in danger when making movies these are shots that are very reminiscent of what was in the old version of the film you see the sun breaking through and the sun hits baby simba and so you see the light change that takes place again it's a long lens and you see it on simba too and part of what's so cool about working with visual effects artists is they make it so convincing by the way
it interacts with the fur the rock face and and because the light is kind of side lit you don't get that flat lighting you get kind of a side and back light on rafiki which is slightly cheated actually because you see it you want it to be on the front of simba but rafiki would really benefits from the side light again when you have flat front delight it kind of reveals imperfections in in the cg characters and backlight and side light is always beautiful photographically whether you're doing a documentary or a cg shot lighting is
a big part of what makes this the effects convincing here in order to keep it feeling a bit more like a documentary and more like something that was natural and to try to fool people into thinking they were seeing something that was live action we had to communicate a lot of the emotion by their their body movement you know you could do anything you could have an animal do anything if you're animating it and oftentimes in films like you know like madagascar you exaggerate the movements the animals are inspired by the animals but you you
exaggerate it for comedic effect in this case we wanted to hold ourselves to the standard of what you would do as though this were a live-action shot that had to fit into a live-action film and how you would do that is you would just look at all this great reference i know when like they made bambi walt would bring in animals for the animators to sketch but now thanks to the internet you have libraries and libraries of footage of animals so you have all the reference you you could ever want for example if we wanted
a bowling giraffe it would start with pencil drawings to indicate what the action should be and then we would go through the library of reference uh video and then we would include thumbnails of ones that seem like it might work within this and the animators would then hand animate the characters that we've designed to be as photo real as possible so what we did is we took natural movements that they might do like bow their head but we coordinated it in a way where it looks like they're all doing it together so individually these actions
are very natural and there's not a lot of expression change on their face and here you have that beautiful side light and backlight that we talked about before to help really sell it so hopefully it has the aesthetic of real animals [Music] to get authenticity part of it was with scouting after the initial scout we would send crews in to take still photographs for photogrammetry photogrammetry is something that you do to get the specific textures of real rocks and such so that you could take that and texture map it onto the 3d geometric assets that
were used to create the 3d set for us to scout in vr set cameras and ultimately render in maya here we come to another iconic moment from the end of the sequence from the original and so here we see sarabi and mufasa we see the silhouette in the distance of rafiki holding the baby we see it once again backlit animals to make it look beautiful we have a side lit contoured pride rock and something that i like to do is i like to keep the skies very simple because you have to get very lucky to
have a beautiful sky when you're really photographing but in cg you could put in whatever sky you want often cg artists are tempted to make the skies beautiful because why not it costs the same amount it's just as easy to do but i find when i watch a movie with a lot of beautiful skies one after the other i'm like that's too lucky for real photography and to me there's something beautiful about naturalism and so this is one of the prettier skies in the movie but you could see that we we showed a lot of
restraint and didn't put like billowing clouds it looks kind of simple the sun is just scraping the animals and and the grass to add some some contour and some separation all of this imagery is important but the most important thing is the music because that's what we really remember we always knew we wanted to use the original songs wherever we could we wanted to re-record them also han zimmer wanted an opportunity to really get in there and finish it because the original it was something where they had a schedule and a budget there was a
lot of digital instruments in that in that orchestra and here was an opportunity for him to re-record it and to update it to as they said to help match the new visuals i think part of why lion king still holds up is that the story is so timeless and enduring and the myths are so clear and the archetypes are so specific stories that repeat themselves with these same characters in these same situations all the way back to ancient egypt i think part of what makes it timeless and part of what makes a disney classic is
combining the old stories with the new technology and that combination makes it memorable but also is part of what i think walt disney brought to his style of storytelling trying to tell stories that aren't just locked into our time frame but but ones that have endured over many generations but presenting it with new tools at his time he was dealing with things like rotoscope and with locking picture to sound for the first time in steamboat willie audio animatronics in disneyland so he was always looking for the new tech to help breathe the magic into these
old stories it's that combination of old and new that i think has made not just lion king but the entire disney library so relevant
