CHENNAI: The tools for working in a purely digital space are altering the shape of filmmaking and the virtual settings enable capturing stunt actors / troupe players (performing the animal characters) on a motion-capture stage. Such films made in “digital background” displacing the conventional outdoor settings where lights, camera, action play a predominant role, delight the young and the old alike.
“Like the Jungle Book, Disney’s Lion King which is based on photo-realistic world will captivate people of all age groups and regions,” asserts Girish Balakrishnan, Lead Virtual Production Developer & Stage Supervisor at MPC, who was in the city on Sunday. “Lion King is going to be live action, aesthetic and look like a photo-realistic movie. Think of Jungle Book without the boy (Mowgli). It is completely a synthetic world that is meant to look realistic and feel like it happened in a real world,” says Girish a key personality of Disney’s The Jungle Book which won the Academy Award in visual effects in February last year.
“I have been working on the Lion King for a year-and-a-half. And that movie is slated for release next year,” he told this correspondent. Girish was in the city to attend the marriage of his cousin and made a brief presentation to his close kin explaining how virtual reality makes one feel akin to what one is looking at on a real set. Perhaps his explanation reminds one of VFX supervisor, Rob Legato who had recently said, “You can walk around the set like a cameraman. (Wearing VR headsets) the actors can now walk into a scene and see the other actors and trees … and because you are in 3D, you get a realistic sense (of the environment).”
“The work I did on Jungle Book is a passionate project for me because it was one of the earliest movie I grew up watching. It was a big project for me and Steven Spielberg is my biggest inspiration,” he told this correspondent.
All the films that he has worked on use the virtual camera as the basis to make films instead of shooting on a physical camera on a real world. “You take the same properties of the real camera and do it completely and authentically on a digital world. That’s why I think Jungle Book resonates so much with so many people because it is completely photo-realistic jungle and shot as if it’s a life like film,” he adds.
