Bill Pope, ASC pushes the boundaries of virtual cinematography for director Jon Favreau's photo-real The Jungle Book.
Director Jon Favreau is an ardent admirer of the 1967 animated Disney film The Jungle Book, but his new feature of the same name is more than just a re-imagining of that story. Favreau opted for an essentially unproven virtual-production methodology, and the result is an almost entirely digitally rendered and animated film that is intended to look completely photo-real. To realize this ambition, the director tapped cinematographer Bill Pope, ASC.
The film features a sole live-action actor, 13-year-old Neel Sethi, who portrays the human boy Mowgli. Only those pieces of the sets that Sethi directly interacted with are real; beyond them, all environments, and the entire cast of supporting animal characters, are CG constructs. Among the film-makers' key collaborators was Rob Legato, ASC, who served as the film's visual-effects supervisor and second-unit director-cinematographer.
Favreau says the idea was to use a process “not unlike an animated film, in that it started with a story department, storyboards and an animatic version. But we moved on to a process more like Avatar [AC Jan. '10], whereby we created a motion-capture version of the movie and then shot the actor [in native 3D] while viewing him interacting with [animated elements] in real time. Then we took all these pieces, like a puzzle, and assembled them using the latest technology. In that sense, we were standing on the shoulders of a giant in Avatar - that was the film whose process ours most resembled, but unlike that film, ours takes place [on Earth], and everything in it had to look entirely real. We wanted to put a live-action sensibility into something that could only be done in a computer.”
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