Magnopus got involved with the Lion King project just before October of 2016, which was right around the time the idea came up to do the Lion King. They were joined by James Austin as another CG Supervisor.

Julien Bolbach was MPC’s first CG Supervisor working on sequence work, which was the Buffalo Stampede sequence. Oliver Winwood was the CG Supervisor but he started as the FX supervisor. Elliot Newman was the other MPC VFX Supervisor.

Oscar-winner Andy Jones headed the Animation team at MPC, with Adam Valdez as the Visual Effects Supervisor. They worked hand in hand with the creative team, especially director Jon Favreau, DoP: Caleb Deschanel, visual effects supervisor: Rob Legato and the team at Magnopus, headed by Ben Grossmann, to innovate the art of virtual production. MPC was the visual effects and animation company that provided the stunning visuals.

The quality of the character animation, the look of the final rendered imagery and the innovation in making the film are just as impressive as the incredible box office success of the film. Jon Favreau speaking at the UE4 User group at SIGGRAPH in LA They succeeded in creating a system that allowed Jon Favreau to direct a movie with high quality, real-time, interactive components, – ‘shot’ in context – while still making a completely computer-generated film. Coupled with game engine technology, they advanced the art of virtual production and produced visual effects and animation combined with a traditional physical production approach. With the Lion King, the creative team sort to take advantage of the revolution in consumer-grade virtual reality technology. With the traditional, iterative approach it can be frustrating for a director to direct a scene when he or she is only directing one component at a time. Disney’s The Lion King aimed to solve a classic VFX/animation problem, namely how to direct a story when the director can’t see all of the things that they are directing.

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