I'm still reading through it, but this is a pretty in-depth and fascinating conversation.
https://www.dga.org/Craft/DGAQ/All-Articles/1902-Spring-2019/Cameron-Favreau-Innovators.aspx
An excerpt:
https://www.dga.org/Craft/DGAQ/All-Articles/1902-Spring-2019/Cameron-Favreau-Innovators.aspx
An excerpt:
F: I try to keep as much energy focused on the task at hand. So I find I get a lot of energy and recharge from being in my environment, being around my family, living at home, having reasonable hours—because these movies take so many years. The Lion King now has taken me three years. And that one starts off as an animated movie with storyboards and every way you break that out. Then, in sort of an extension of what I learned in looking at your work in Avatar, I understood through making The Jungle Book, we're working with those technologies.
In [The Lion King's] case, VR as opposed to motion capture. But essentially the same thing, virtual camera…
C: So you're standing all the creatures up with key frame?
F: Yes.
C: And then are you going in and doing all your cameras using the VR interface?
F: Yes. Because I kind of see each movie as a puzzle, and I try to apply whatever technology's relevant at the time to that puzzle. In Jungle Book, we had a real kid and parts of real sets, and so it was grounded through that. The characters that were CG and the set extended upon something organic. [On Lion King], there was nothing organic at all. There were no sets, there were no characters, there's no motion capture. There's no photography at all. So we eliminated lights and cameras and sets, and we created a volume, which was not unlike when I visited you as you were doing capture for Avatar.
So in Lion King, we set up the animation using the game engine Unity. We built all the sets first, and then we would go in VR to the environment. So we could actually walk around and would do scouts together, all in VR, in the real environment.
C: Using headsets?
F: Yeah. HMDs [head-mounted displays].
C: And how are you creating shots?
F: First we would go in there with (DP) Caleb Deschanel and (VFX supervisor) Rob Legato and (production designer) James Chinlund and just scout. It's like six people, in headsets, together, and we created basically a multi-player filmmaking game. And instead of just using a handheld on splines, with a screen, we used the hand controllers so we could scout within it. And then when it actually came time to film, we had a full crew in the volume.
So we had a dolly grip, a camera with wheels and cranes. And so the human touch and the analog feeling of the camera movements gave the key frame animation more of an organic look. And so by creating a really robust interface that mimicked the set, even with an AD [and] a full crew. So if you walked on our set, it would look like a movie set except you were in the middle of a black box.
C: There's no lights.
F: Right. And then when you popped on the headset, you would see the lights. Or the skydome. And we would move that. And so Caleb would prelight for a long time, and he's never been involved with any technology…
C: But lighting's lighting. I think it's healthy to have somebody who understands real-world lighting coming into a virtual world and approaching it as they would photographically.
C: It actually creates a new culture. The thing is we're in a merged state between the cinematic paradigm of cameras and cranes and Steadicams and all that sort of thing, and the VR paradigm, which is just the CG camera, which can go through the eye of a needle and rocket up to the top of the Empire State Building.
And what I find is that the Steadicam and the dolly and the crane that you are physically using on set—see, I rejected all that 12 years ago—and said, "I'm going to keep it in my mind." Because I've worked with all those tools and I know them. But where I think that can be super-important is if somebody's coming into it that never worked with all those tools, and if they just start flying the camera around, it becomes weightless and massless, and you get these impossible angles.
What I have is a top A-camera operator—a camera operator who's also a Steadicam operator, and he works with me. So I do the gestural camera. He says, "What was that?" And I say, "Well, that was a technocrane, and I was pushing out with the stick and then I rose up and I came over here." And then he'll refine the movement I did—smooth out the base-move but free up the rotation, so it can still have a little bit of a wheels feel.
