The tricky thing about Mufasa: The Lion King was that Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) had never worked on a VFX-driven franchise film before. However, production VFX supervisor Adam Valdez and his MPC team (who are on the Oscar shortlist) promised the indie director that they would focus on making Barry Jenkins’ film.
It explores the inner lives of the teens Mufasa (Aaron Pierre) and Taka/Scar (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) who appear in the original story in a poetic visual style. This was a relief to Jenkins and his team, cinematographer James Laxton, production designer Mark Friedberg, and editor Joy McMillon.
“These movies we’re making with Disney are all about taking an existing world and letting the director tell the story of that world vocally,” Valdez told IndieWire. “Barry and his team have made so many films together, and they have an intimate style that connects with the characters.”
This started with early animation tests to find ways to bring out the emotional performance with another level of depth and subtlety. “After watching his movies, I knew the camera was going to be very close to my face,” Valdez continued. “So, that was No. 1. The second thing is that the overarching process of making these movies is so long and step-by-step complicated. It takes months to make one scene. What we were trying to achieve for Barry was an opportunity for discovery, with lots of presents and surprises along the way, and he decided to incorporate that process into his work. It’s very open.”
“Mufasa: The Lion King” Disney
For “Mufasa,” MPC employed a more robust virtual production workflow than for Jon Favreau’s “The Lion King.” This started with VR (London, New York, and Los Angeles) using Unreal Engine for location scouting and camera layout, allowing Jenkins and his team to mimic the familiar live-action filmmaking process. Covering the breadth and beauty of Africa’s landscape (77 sets, 125 square miles), including thrilling scenes such as swirling flood waters and herds of elephants, Jenkins will feel like he’s riding a roller coaster with Mufasa. I wanted to make it.
“Is this where we want to work? Will this work for our scene or does it need to change?” Valdez said of VR. “Then during filming we have action and performances, and we also think about coverage. But in the middle of the process, for certain scenes where character interaction and close contact with each other is more important, we direct the camera and performance at the same time.” We decided to start using live capture more during filming because we felt we needed the ability to do that. Of course, Barry is used to it.
“So over the course of this journey, we’re trying to emulate some things like live action. It’s taking the initial shots, developing them, getting the look and lighting, and adjusting the lighting and camera. It’s about bringing them to the surface for notes or sending them to Barry for sensation and color.”
Meanwhile, MPC’s renowned “Character Lab” team of artists created over 118 unique animals. The intricate sensitivity and emotional expressiveness of the lion in this film is taken to a new level. The digital tools for the animal’s fur have been completely rebuilt to give it a more natural look and allow for some adventurous sequences where the lion swims and interacts with the snow.
“Mufasa: The Lion King” Disney
“Many VFX characters are often on set,” Valdez says. “We wanted everything to feel like it had character, whether it was grass, snow, water, etc. So we evolved technology just for fur and combined it with all of those things. There was a big movement to see if it could be connected in this way.
But the biggest innovation was a new process called quad cap. In this process, MPC animators wearing dots walk around in a circle as bipedal human beings, reciting lines already recorded by the actors, while surrounding computer screens show images of lions strolling through the savannah. I did. Straight line. They had 10 audio recording sessions with the actors, and the staff set up locked cameras in the room to capture their facial expressions and movements, which became the basis for Lion, but Quadcap is even more anthropomorphic. Added properties.
“Traditionally, capturing human performance and translating it into animals has always been difficult,” Valdez said. “That’s not easy to do, especially live, so MPC’s animation team took their motion capture and translated it into quadrupedal movement as a way to speed up the creation of scenes. He had already done something clever.
“There was a combination of techniques that were developed during filming,” he continued. “Somewhere along the way, we were asked if we could just do this. So it’s a combination of a stage team and real mechanisms, and the human body appears, like a robot puppet, and the lion moves. It appears.The front legs are like front legs. However, the hind legs are created entirely from the movement of the front legs. No matter where you move your head, the lion’s entire neck and head move, so the animators are mapping it out as best they can. Then, to add features to the game. We needed Epic’s Unreal Engine, turned it back on in our editing software, and the lion was able to follow the terrain.”
“Mufasa: The Lion King” Disney
This worked well for Jenkins in directing some of the walking, talking character’s moments, particularly in the early scenes where Mufasa grows up with Taka and his adoptive family. These were treated as backdrops for familiar types of neighborhoods often seen in Jenkins’ films.
“The first act is where the mother and father have to do with how they work with their children and how the children collaborate with each other,” Valdez said. “Barry would often tell coming-of-age stories, which were like a distillation of the emotions he wanted to get out of these moments, at least what the kids were going through.
“He jumps from boy to teenager in one cut, something he’s done before in other films,” Valdez added. “Just the feeling of life itself, the way things are happening, the feeling of growing up so quickly, that feeling of movement. So ultimately we’re adjusting the visual effects and animation to make the audience feel like they’re alone in this world.” , which connects him to Mufasa, who feels like he doesn’t belong.”
“Mufasa: The Lion King” is currently in theaters.
