Hacker Cinema
The Lion King
2019 · Film · 118 min
Directed by Jon Favreau
Simba idolizes his father, King Mufasa, and takes to heart his own royal destiny. But not everyone in the kingdom celebrates the new cub's arrival. Scar, Mufasa's brother—and former heir to the throne—has plans of his own. The battle for Pride Rock is ravaged with betrayal, tragedy and drama, ultimately resulting in Simba's exile. With help from a curious pair of newfound friends, Simba will have to figure out how to grow up and take back what is rightfully his.
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VFX powerhouse MPC, renowned for its work on The Lion King (2019), 1917, and Life of Pi, faces possible closure as parent company Technicolor grapples with severe financial struggles. Despite delivering groundbreaking visual effects and winning an Academy Award for Life of Pi, MPC now confronts an uncertain future. The company has played a key role in shaping modern visual effects, contributing to some of the most visually stunning films of the past decade. However, ongoing financial difficulties at Technicolor put the studio’s legacy and hundreds of jobs at risk, raising concerns about the future of high-end VFX production.
Man, what I’d do to have a theatre experience like that again.
I feel like I’ve already seen just about every movie I see these days. I watch them to just tune out occasionally, like a safer version of alcohol. I don’t watch them because it’ll be moving, insightful, exciting, etc. It’s just coarse stimulation.
I really miss movies that left me feeling like I had a significant experience. It happens occasionally, but I feel like it used to be more common. The lion king was amazing. The remake was a kick in the pants.
You know he was good when the Lion King remake had a chance to recast the entire movie with actors like Beyoncé and Donald Glover and the casting director was like “well obviously we aren’t changing Mufasa.”
Oh wow, that's just amazing, thanks for the link! From the article:
''' Interestingly, there was a technical bump or glitch in the Unity Engine. A feature that no user would normally have any control over, that caused a bump that made it all the way from the D23 footage to the final film. Every once in awhile the Unity Engine clears our any unneeded data or assets from the Engine.
Unfortunately, when this random function, deep in the code called ‘garbage collection’ ran it could cause a tiny pause in the smooth movement of the master Unity Camera. One such ‘bump’ happens in a shot in the D23 trailer. After the trailer was complete, the team discovered what the issue was and fixed it. But even when the shot was redone much later, this ‘bump’ is still in the final camera move, just because Rob Legato liked the feel of the recorded natural move, even with the bump. For the creative team, ironically given its causes, it just felt natural. '''
https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/how-virtual-production-worked-on-set-of-the-lion-king/#:~:text=Interestingly%2C%20there%20was%20a%20technical,causes%2C%20it%20just%20felt%20natural
This reminds me of one of the tweets that live inside my head and makes itself known every once in a while, about the Lion King movie: https://twitter.com/glowcoil/status/1204511618769588225 ("when the gc sounds warmer" https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/how-virtual-production-worked-on-set-of-the-lion-king/ )
Incorrect: https://www.engadget.com/2019-07-29-lion-king-remake-vfx-mpc-interview.html
The film was shot almost entirely in Unity, then the final render used some extra stuff and other tools. But the scenes, shots, etc were done in Unity. A quick google shows you this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WupuXjvO9uA Making of videos on Youtube, you see the Unity editor in many places while they film in VR
I think the Lion King movie was made in Unity
I think the trick with some of these debates is just stepping back from the media cycle. I really noticed this with Captain Marvel where for a few months any criticism was suddenly seized-upon as evidence of the person undermining the future of girls/women worldwide, but now, a few years later, nobody thinks that the movie needs defending so vigorously.
As an aside, I noticed a couple days ago that in the live-action Lion King, the person voicing Simba sings, "everywhere you look, I'm standing in the spotlight" in place of just "I'm standing spotlight" in the older version, which is almost a metaphor for the differences since that little verbal error in the animated version feels more humanistic
Video engineer here. Many seemingly network restricted tasks could be unlocked with faster CPUS doing advanced compression and decompression.
1. Video Calls
In video calls, encoding and decoding is actually a significant cost of video calls, not just networking. Right now the peak is Zoom's 30 video streams onscreen, but with 1000x CPUS you can have 100s of high quality streams with advanced face detection and superscaling[1]. Advanced computer vision models could analyze each face creating a face mesh of vectors, then send those vector changes across the wire instead of a video frame. The receiving computers could then reconstruct the face for each frame. This could completely turn video calling into a CPU restricted task.
2. Incredible Realistic and Vast Virtual Worlds
Imagine the most advanced movie realistic CGI being generated for each frame. Something like the new Lion King or Avatar like worlds being created before you through your VR headset. With extremely advanced eye tracking and graphics, VR would hit that next level of realism. AR and VR use cases could explode with incredibly light headsets.
To be imaginative, you could have everything from huge concerts to regular meetings take play in the real world, but be scanned and sent to VR participants in real time. The entire space including the room and whiteboard or live audience could be rendered in realtime for all VR participants.
[1] https://developer.nvidia.com/maxine-getting-started
Way back in 2019 someone use deepfake tech at the time to change what new lion king could look like. This is what i think some of us are thinking.
http://geekdommovies.com/heres-what-the-live-action-lion-king-would-look-like-if-the-cgi-was-closer-to-the-original-animated-movie/
I have a decently old LG 3d tv that can actually turn 2d into 3d, and its actually a lot of fun to watch certain stuff in 3d mode.
> Games like the RE series get remade so that they earn money off of previous investments again.
Seems a bit disingenuous. The RE2 remake was fantastic and significantly different from the original in terms of gameplay. Remaking a game seems very different from remaking a movie. I've got high hopes for RE4's upcoming remake. I can't imagine being excited for a remade movie barring some reason to think it will differ. The lion king is the weirdest remake of them all, being mostly shot for shot but with weird CGI.
The top grossing films of the 1970s? The original Star Wars, Jaws, The Exorcist, Alien, The Godfather? Rocky 2 and Jaws 2 are also on the list so it's not like there weren't any sequels at all, but that group of films really _wasn't_ dominated by remakes and franchise films:
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls026560159/
By comparison, entries for the 2010s include MCU franchise films, Star Wars Sequels, Jurassic World (a sequel), The Lion King (Remake), etc:
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls026040906/
Going year-by-year doesn't really change things very much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films#High-grossing_films_by_year
The Chinese government has seeped its way into nearly every facet of American life. This is most visible in Disney movies (see: the Mulan and Lion King remakes) but it is happening to many companies and universities where they use our own greed against us. I hope America will wake up and realize we have fighting a hidden war, but we are so divided I doubt we'll notice until we've lost, if we notice at all.
I've seen musculoskeleton simulation (although passive and not active) used throughout VFX quite a lot, its basically what Weta Digital has been doing for years. (For example from the Hobbit movie 8 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r45e5Xky35k). Hell, Maya even has its own muscle system (Maya Muscle) that animators can already use out of the box. So the technology to simulate these kinds of things (at adequate realism for animations and movies) is already there.
The problem is that it takes a painstakingly long time to do the modelling for these kinds of stuff. Anatomy is hard to get right, high quality commercial human template models cost you $10000+, and even then you're going to take a lot of time tweaking mesh geometry to make the simulation work. And the musculoskeletal models you're creating are all going to have different body shapes and might not even be human, so you need to create a lot of things from scratch (there was a recent paper on a musculoskeleton design tool for precisely this: https://www.dgp.toronto.edu/projects/modeling-musculoskeletal-anatomy) So you need a lot of work to do even just passive simulation (where the articulated skeleton just kinematically mimics the animation and the muscle effects are secondary)
Though the bullet points you've listed are definitely all good research topics in itself. DeepMimic-style active musculoskeleton simulations (where models physically mimic given animation data using only muscle activations) are currently possible for line-segment muscles (the paper: https://mrl.snu.ac.kr/research/ProjectScalable/Page.htm) It uses Deep Reinforcement Learning with lots of training and fine-tuning though, it's not plug-and-play in its current state. Maybe such a similar thing can be also done with volumetric muscles too, but that's definitely going to be a hard paper to write since FEM simulation is incredibly costly and finicky to run stably, and you need a lot of simulation frames to use DRL.
But I think the fundamental issue is: does this all have to do with actually making a good film/animation, outside of the realm of biomechanics? I really don't think so. The latest remastered Disney films all lack the fluidity of 2D animation of the past; the remade Lion King has one of the best realistically simulated animal characters but is utterly void of any artistic merit. And these graphical improvements don't seem to make the artist's life easier and is making animation even more labor-intensive. Nowadays it feels like artists in those big industries have less room to experiment because of all these "realistic" technical requirements. From this viewpoint, it makes sense why Disney/Pixar has still focused more on superficial skin deformation instead of a more realistic biomechanical approach: when making cartoonish 3D animations you need a lot of squash-and-stretch, and that is hard to do with rigid muscle systems. Better to model your character as a blob of mass, it's easier to animate, keyframe, and employ all kinds of effects to express artistic intent.
2019 remakes or sequels: Lion King, Spider Man, Jumanji, Frozen, Avengers, Toy Story, Aladdin, Dr Sleep, Godzilla, Terminator, John Wick, Zombieland.
There were a few good movies in 2019 like every year.
Hollywood overall has become extremely derivative and market focused.
I didn't study this movie frame by frame, but I feel the new lion king movie was photo realistic. It seems like that given enough time, human and computer, you can achieve a great result.
According to Bloomberg[0], non-gaming clients make up 10% of Unity's business.
> [Unity] helps Volkswagen AG train employees, was used by filmmakers to shoot the recent “Lion King” movie and by the Hong Kong International Airport to simulate changes in passenger volume.
I don't know enough about these domains to say whether it's a good (or bad) idea, but I've also heard of Unity being used for other kinds of modeling and simulations too (climatology, traffic, etc).
[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-07/unity-technologies-aims-to-bring-video-game-tools-into-the-real-world
I've always held the same view, I call it "companies taking the easy way out". Another recent example is Disney making the lion cast in The Lion King 2019 live action movie black. What a completely disingenuous statement. Disney could actually fund and make their first black male lead in a Disney movie, which would actually contribute significantly in addressing systematic racism in at least the movie/animation industry. Instead Disney chose to massage their egos so that whenever they get called out for the lack of black characters in leading Disney roles they can say but we had an all black cast for the lions in The Lion King.
It didn’t really strike me as looking that terrible. I certainly didn’t have the visceral reaction the article describes. I had to watch the trailers again to understand what they were talking about... it’s a film about human-cat hybrids that communicate through interpretive dance and overblown songs, what the fuck do people expect!?
Mind, I really enjoyed the Lion King remake. It didn’t tarnish my childhood memory of the original (which would be quite difficult, since my parents could only afford a poor quality pirate VHS copy, and not the cinema trip). Apparently people hated that too.
Cats looks surreal enough that it’d probably be a good date flick, nothing to actually take seriously. Definitely a memorable moment. Same as watching the Twilight films.
They are of course proficient at worthwhile acquisitions (Marvel and Lucasfilm come to mind) but they also still make movies that rake in the cash. Their recent remake of the Lion King had a box office of 1.655 billion. It is of course debatable whether or not these remakes are as good as the originals or whether they maintain the creativity and originality that Disney has become known for, but it doesn't seem to be debatable that they are successful financially.
Not to mention, Disney is excellent at marketing. Top of their class, I'd say.
I went to a few links and they were ridiculous untrue articles. We need a bullshit meter for articles that purport to be legitimate. None of the three I clicked were.
Disney with Fox (who will only have contributed 15% of their percentage or 4% overall) have a 40% box office revenue percent this year. That is absolutely insane. I’m not sure when the last a company had that much of the box office. But it hasn’t been done for a while.
Lion King grossed $1.6B. $1B outside the US and $500M+ in the US/CA. Yet one of the articles was trying to use the movie as an example of Disney’s decline? I can’t come up with words to describe how silly that is.
I personally do not like Disney controlling the media market so much and do not like most of what they put out. But I’m not going to straight up lie and say their dominance isn’t there.
> but there's a lot of diminishing returns
Disney disagrees. Have a look at the box office of their live action remakes:
- Beauty and the Beast: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=beautyandthebeast2017.htm
- Aladdin: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=disneyfairytale22019.htm
- The Lion King: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=lionkingliveaction.htm
Why wouldn't they keep making the same movies over and over with billion dollar returns like that?
Maybe it was inspired by the review by David Ehrlich?
> David Ehrlich of IndieWire panned the film, writing, "Unfolding like the world's longest and least convincing deepfake, Jon Favreau's (almost) photorealistic remake of The Lion King is meant to represent the next step in Disney's circle of life. Instead, this soulless chimera of a film comes off as little more than a glorified tech demo from a greedy conglomerate — a well-rendered but creatively bankrupt self-portrait of a movie studio eating its own tail."
The only big movies I know of with talking, photorealistic animals are the Jungle Book remake, and this Lion King remake. “Caught up” is a bit of a stretch when most anthropomorphic stories are still heavily stylized.
I’m very happy that Disney went whole-warthog in making the models realistic. This halfway between cartoony-but-real look isn’t good. The new Lion King was visually stunning and reminded me of a Nat Geo film. The characters didn’t emote very well, and the voice actors had to carry the performance, but at least the animals looked good.
(That’s not to say the story was great... but that’s also not the point.)
Detective Pikachu almost fell into the uncanny valley with some characters (especially the ones with the “real” eyes) for the same reason.
For 3-D cartoon animals, IMO Zootopia’s style really hit the sweet spot of cartoony-but-recognizable species.
Wow, 5 downvotes in under an hour for stating my opinion. Would somebody who thinks otherwise like to share?
You are right in regards to building on stuff that they already own. All the movies this year that have grossed over $100 Million have been based on older content.
1 Avengers: Endgame
2 The Lion King (2019)
3 Captain Marvel
4 Toy Story 4
5 Aladdin (2019)
6 Dumbo (2019)
This piece is more likely an ad for the recent Lion King movie.
They're pretty much everyone else. New releases of these "same games" bring better graphics, or animations, or gameplay, or story, or any combination of the previous. FIFA, in addition I assume they also include the new players and trades that happened since the last version (but I don't play FIFA so I could be wrong here).
Nostalgia is also a big factor, with so many reboots and adaptations of source material to new media, today's adults will pay to see all the Marvel blockbusters because they read the comics or saw the TV show as kids. I'd bet many people that bought MK9 - which rebooted the saga - did it for nostalgia. The same probably happened with the new Tomb Raiders, also a reboot of the series. Have you heard of the new The Lion King? Or Dumbo? Or Aladdin? Or any of the 500 new remakes Disney wants to make? Same thing.
> I'd love to see another attempt at a photorealistic 100% CG movie
Isn't that what Disney's Lion King remake is doing?
"Those movies — including “Captain Marvel,” “Dumbo,” “Toy Story 4,” “The Lion King,” “Frozen 2” and a new “Star Wars” installment — will now be key selling points for the new service Iger has referred to as “Disney Play.”
Sounds like the successor to DisneyToons, the crap sequel division of Disney. Should be called "Disney Replay".
Meanwhile, Amazon is coming out with new stories.