Latin America. Rob Legato, visual effects supervisor, employed a wide variety of Blackmagic Design products in creating the virtual production environment for Disney's "The Lion King." It was directed by Jon Favreau and features the voices of Donald Glover and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. In addition, it has grossed nearly $1500 million worldwide since its premiere on July 19 of this year.
With the technology available today, producing a 3D feature film doesn't have to be a process where you have to wait until the team responsible for the animations has finished their work. Rob Legato, an Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor for films like "Hugo" and "The Jungle Book," wanted to take technology to another level. Therefore, he created a space in which traditional filmmakers could work in a digital environment with familiar tools from the real set. "The goal was not to generate every shot on the computer equipment," Legato said, "but to photograph the digital environment as if it were a real one."
The production set where "The Lion King" was filmed was perhaps a bit strange, with unusual devices to fill in the main floor and various technicians behind computers located around the perimeter. Likewise, all this was just the beginning. To begin with the recordings, director Jon Favreau and filmmaker Caleb Deschanel had headphones that took them to the virtual world of Mufasa and Simba.
Instead of forcing filmmakers to adopt digital tools, Legato modified physical devices for the purpose of using them in the virtual world. For example, a crane was altered with tracking equipment to allow computers to recreate its movement perfectly. A Steadicam stand was even purchased, in order to give Deschanel the possibility to move the camera virtually with the same features as in a real shoot.
The objective was for the production to create the contents in a traditional way with standard products that exist not only on the set but also at the digital level. "In the classic preview stage, the camera would be moved completely in the environment of the computer equipment," Legato said. "But in our virtual set, we directly added rails for the travelin, which represented this with great precision."
Blackmagic Design was not only part of the system, but also the basis of the entire process, since it provided the infrastructure for both the virtual world and the studio. Matt Rubin, visual effects producer, explained: "First of all, we used Blackmagic equipment to distribute the signals throughout the building, as well as to handle them at every stage of production. We also use DeckLink cards to capture the images, different Micro Studio Camera 4K units such as secondary cameras, various mixers, such as the ATEM Production Studio 4K and ATEM Television Studio HD models."
The stages of editing and creating visual effects were linked by Smart Videohub matrices, which offered access to both departments to the projection room, as well as to the images used there for the different shots. As the virtual environment was generated, the material was captured with DeckLink cards and played back over a video network, the signal of which was sent to the control room and recorded on different HyperDeck Studio Mini devices.
Once the material was recorded and stored on computer equipment, the dynamics of the work passed to MPC, the company responsible for the visual effects, in order to generate the photorealistic images. During the stage of evaluating the images and maintaining an updated edition, Legato and his team relied on the DaVinci Resolve Studio program and various DaVinci Resolve Advanced Panel devices in two different rooms, in which he himself applied chromatic adjustments to the shots as a guide for the final color grading. The project in DaVinci Resolve was updated several times a day with the new material supplied by MPC. Since Legato only showed the images to Favreau in context, rather than including individual clips, it was important that he could unify the aesthetics of the shots, in order to ensure a more enjoyable experience. The software database was shared among the entire team, allowing multiple members to view the same timeline without having to go to the screening room.
Despite the modern systems that were used to shoot the feature film, the final product reflects the true art of cinema, simply by providing real tools throughout the creative process. "The virtual environment created a flexible world in which we were able to film," Legato added.
