Lion King: Actors enter virtual film scenes before shooting

At the company's own D23 Expo, Disney showed the visitorsin addition to the news about the new Star Wars theme parkfor the first time excerpts from the upcoming remake of theof the classic animated film Lion King. For the realisation of the project the production team used virtual reality in.

Disney draws on its rich portfolio of classic animated films and remakes them as live-action films: in 2016 it was "The Jungle Book", in 2017 "Beauty and the Beast". "Dumbo" and "The Lion King" will follow next year. At D23, visitors saw the remake of the famous scene in which the newborn lion cub Simba is introduced to the assembled animal kingdom on the King's Rock for the first time.

VR strengthens the actors' imagination

Rob Legato, who is responsible for the film's special effects, told us at a talk in April that the film team and the actors use VR technology to help their imaginations take flight. Because the film is largely created on a computer and the actors act in front of a green screen, virtual reality helps those involved to get an idea of the scenery that is only seen later in the finished film.

"We're going to use a lot of VR tools so that it feels like you're on a real film set," explains Legato. "You can walk around the set like a cameraman and enter a scene as an actor and see other actors and trees. Because the experience is spatial, you get a realistic sense of the environment," says Legato.

The Lion King will be released in cinemas in July 2019.

The film industry and virtual reality are getting closer

The fact that virtual reality is used during filming is probably also due to the influence of the director: Filmmaker Jon Favreau is one of the biggest advocates of VR technology in Hollywood and has already realised a cinematic VR experience for HTC Vive with Gnomes & Goblins.

Virtual reality is likely to become a standard tool for films, most of which are created on computers, sooner or later.

At Apple's WWDC developer conference, Epic Games demonstrated where the journey could take us: Epic employee Lauren Ridge used the Unreal Editor to create a scene from Star Wars within virtual reality by importing original graphic assets and placing them in the virtual environment using the Vive controllers.

Source: Vrodo / Youtube