It would be further developed by Technicolor’s MPC, VFX Supervisor Rob Legato, Production Designer James Chinlund, Magnopus, Unity and other game engine companies, as they all came together to work on The Lion King.

The methodology MPC VFX Supervisor Adam Valdez had discussed with Disney and director Jon Favreau would come into play as virtual production got underway in June of 2017. Now we had the new shared memory of Africa that would inform all of our work going forward.” For many of us, The Lion King was already a beautiful memory from childhood. “We knew from the start we were all in this together, and you couldn’t have had a more invested team. “Because everybody was part of this trip, it really unified the team,” concludes Ferrara. We had a very high bar to meet – to both do justice to the original film and bring something new to the story that pays respect to its roots in Africa.” “There is nothing like seeing these animals in the wild to make one truly appreciate the beautiful harmony of life that is going on there.

“The safari we went on at the onset of this project is something I will never forget,” recalls Animation Supervisor Andy Jones. It built a common memory of spaces, so that when Caleb Deschanel (the cinematographer) references the light halfway up Mount Kenya, everybody remembers exactly what he’s talking about.”įrom here, the entire project – the development of the environments and the characters – would be informed by these initial trips to Africa, where the team experienced firsthand the landscape, the light, and the continent’s stark beauty. It created a common experience that enabled me to understand exactly what James Chinlund (the production designer) wanted to achieve in terms of sets and environments. “Traveling to Africa was important to that goal. “For me in charge of the sets, the main goal was to replicate the natural environment in such a way that the audience believes they are in Africa on the savannah,” adds MPC’s Audrey Ferrara, DFX Supervisor. “From a helicopter, going back out over and over again for a couple of weeks, you really get a meta understanding of it as a real place the expansive vistas, the diversity of the landscape, the colors and variety of tones, how the vegetation grows and what the light feels like.” “Going to Kenya was about getting what you can’t get from seeing pictures of it,” elaborates Valdez. The team would need to see the African Savannah with their own eyes and experience the sense of place for themselves. For such a mission, references alone would not suffice.

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