The Lion King

        For this assignment I watched the making of the new The Lion King. The crew of this film was faced with many challenges from the start. The biggest challenge for them was trying to figure out how to turn the traditionally animated 1994 film of the same name into a photorealistic remake.  This film was created using virtual reality which is a brand new technology in filmmaking. The most interesting part about this is that on set there was not a single set or costume in sight because every shot except for the first was created using a computer program. Producer Jon Favreau and his crew took a research trip to Kenya where they photographed the landscape and studied how the animals interact and move. They then programmed a virtual reality and wandered around African landscapes and picked out places that they wanted to film as if they were really there.

        In the main room of the warehouse almost everything was black — black padding on the walls, black VR headsets, and black dolly tracks for the camera. The camera would moved around and film the open space and this was placed in the virtual reality program. The amount of pre production planning that this film took is incredible and seeing what they started with compared to the final product is unbelievable. The mind boggling part of this whole thing is that the entire movie is that the camera dolly is placed in the computer program and moved around through the virtual reality. This is by far the most interesting video I have ever seen and it is truly worth the watch.