A DIFFERENT BEAST
THE ‘SET’ OF JON FAVREAU’S Lion King couldn’t be less impressive. It’s a big, black room in a dull building in Playa Vista, California. It looks like somewhere more likely to host a zumba class than a zebra herd. Yet within this room exist acres of African land: lush jungles, scorching desert, a big rock from which a baboon dangles a baby. We just can’t see it yet.
It’s December 2017. Favreau is remaking one of the most famous animated movies ever and using mad technology to do so. In this room exists a ‘virtual world’ in which Favreau is directing his movie. He pops on VR specs and he’s inside a computer-generated world where he can set up any shot he can imagine. He’ll use no on-screen actors nor motion capture, no real animals, not even a single blade of grass, but the finished result should look so lifelike that David Attenborough could wander on screen and start telling you about the majesty of warthogs without anyone batting an eyelid.
“I honestly don’t even know what to call it,” says Favreau. “[Early on] the term ‘live action’ had been bandied about to differentiate it from the expectations one
