Jon Favreau on the art of dig­i­tal storytelling

Unless you’ve worked at the very top end of the scale, the nuts and bolts of putting togeth­er a $175m movie will prob­a­bly seem like an alien con­cept. So how do you tell a sto­ry that fus­es live action ele­ments with motion cap­ture tech­nol­o­gy and cut­ting-edge visu­al effects while man­ag­ing a team of 2000 artists and tech­ni­cians? To find out, we asked direc­tor Jon Favreau to break down the three-year pro­duc­tion of The Jun­gle Book. Here is his fas­ci­nat­ing first-hand insight into how the process works.

“I’m one small cog in a big machine. Direct­ing a movie like The Jun­gle Book is real­ly more like being a coach, or a gen­er­al try­ing to organ­ise a mil­i­tary oper­a­tion. But in the begin­ning it’s just me with a bunch of sto­ry­board artists and a team of writ­ers. The sto­ry­board artists pitch gags, brain­storm ideas, and take script pages and con­vert them into frames. Then you start to put it togeth­er in ani­mat­ics until you have a pen­cil ver­sion of the whole movie.

“At that point you switch over from ani­ma­tion to a motion cap­ture mod­el. You put on a vir­tu­al real­i­ty HMD head­set like the Ocu­lus, or you’re there with an Xbox con­troller look­ing at every­thing on a screen. A lot of that was using a game engine, so real­ly it looked like we were design­ing a video game at that point. We built por­tions of the set to match the motion cap­ture stuff we were film­ing with vir­tu­al cam­eras. At the same time we go and record with the voice actors and gath­er data and video ref­er­ences of their faces while they’re per­form­ing. I would bring Neel (Sethi) in to per­form with them, and the edi­tors would cut that togeth­er like a radio play.

“All of that goes into the com­put­er so now you’re watch­ing back a full video game ver­sion of the movie. So you have the back­grounds, you have the kid, you have the ani­mals – now you set cam­eras up and pick each angle. That was a lot like how they filmed Avatar. It feels very organ­ic, a lot like a prac­ti­cal shoot because essen­tial­ly you’re using all the same per­son­nel that you would on a live action movie – assis­tant direc­tors, cin­e­matog­ra­phers, cameramen.

“The next step is fig­ur­ing out how much set we have to build, where the cam­era goes, where the lights go. We made a big check­list and pro­ceed­ed to build lit­tle cook­ie cut­ter sets for where we need­ed Mowgli to walk around. We had Neel inter­act­ing with pup­pets and oth­er actors, and as soon as we got the shot we would imme­di­ate­ly cut it in – because it’s all dig­i­tal – so lit­tle by lit­tle the live action ele­ments start to come togeth­er. Once we had a cut of the film with Neel in we start­ed show­ing it to the stu­dio. We actu­al­ly screened it to a few audi­ences as well which was very scary – you basi­cal­ly have to say to them, ​‘Pre­tend this looks real.’ It was ask­ing a lot and I don’t real­ly know how use­ful that part of the process was. It was quite nerve-wrack­ing to be hon­est with you, but it’s some­thing that Dis­ney do on all their ani­mat­ed films.

“Then final­ly it goes to MPC or Weta and that’s where the mag­ic real­ly begins because they start ani­mat­ing the per­for­mances of all the ani­mals. I would meet with them and give notes to the ani­ma­tors, and some­times I would do some motion cap­ture stuff, say if I want­ed to show how Baloo should move in a par­tic­u­lar scene. For King Louie I actu­al­ly put the motion cap­ture suit on and act­ed every­thing out. The face is all Chris Walken, but the body move­ments are most­ly me. It’s real­ly a lot of fun.”