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How 'The Jungle Book' Made Its Animals Look So Real With Groundbreaking VFX (inverse.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article on Inverse that looks into how The Jungle Book movie was made. Following are some of the interesting tidbits from the story: Directed by Jon Favreau, this version of The Jungle Book, which borrows from both Disney's 1967 cartoon and the original Rudyard Kipling novel, sets a new standard for life-like CGI animals. Shot entirely on a soundstage in downtown Los Angeles, it is sort of a hybrid of Avatar and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with one human performer surrounded by animated creatures -- the difference being that every effort was made to trick the audience into believing the animals were real. [...] For the most complicated scenes, the computational power required was astounding. "It would take 30-40 hours per frame, and since it's stereo [or 3D], it requires two frames to produce one frame of the movie -- at 2K, not even 4K," Oscar-winning visual effects director Rob Legato said. "So you can tell how much the computer has to figure out, exactly what it's doing, how it's bouncing, how much of the light is absorbed, because when it hits an object, some gets absorbed and some gets reflected." The math there is mind-boggling; it takes a full 24 frames to make up a single second of the movie, and most shots are between five and ten seconds. That required "literally thousands of computers," Legato said, and eventually, some creative solutions. "I think they started using the Google cloud, which has tens of thousands of computers, and sometimes it would take two or three days to render a shot, he said, exasperated at the mere thought of the process. As powerful as the computers were, they ultimately were just taking cues from the human innovators who spent years on the film. "In all this," Legato said, "there's no real computer that replaces the skill of the operator, of the person who is pushing the buttons."
Just curious. We as human are so intune to relate with humans, that a CG Human would look lifeless and fake, especially when animated. Non-Humans not so much so, as we don't relate on the same level. But would a bear watching it have a uncanny valley when seeing another bear?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I feel, this is probably one movie I don't need to watch. As you said, the story is likely to take a back seat to the visual effects.
And maybe, it's just me but seeing the previews, it felt extremely jarring. The visual effects are so much on the wrong side of the uncanny valley. It is glaringly obvious that all the animals and a lot of the background is CGI rather than real objects. And to me it feels very disturbing and distracting. Of course, if there is no story to distract from, then maybe that doesn't matter as much...