Production Designer Christopher Glass On the Numerous Risks Disney Took With The Jungle Book
This week sees the Blu-ray and DVD release of Walt Disney's groundbreaking live action/CG-animated [...]
This week sees the Blu-ray and DVD release of Walt Disney's groundbreaking live action/CG-animated remake of its animated classic The Jungle Book.
Based on the novel by Rudyard Kipling, the story follows Mowgli, a young orphan who is raised by jungle animals, and deals with murder, conspiracy, and intrigue in the animal kingdom.
The world of the novel was brought to life by a talented team of filmmakers and animators under the direction of Iron Man director Jon Favreau and production designer Christopher Glass, who had to take on the daunting task of creating a world in a totally new way.
Glass joined ComicBook.com to talk about the film, which you can get on DVD, Blu-ray and digital streaming today.
For those of us who relatively inexperienced in the process here: How is it different being a production designer on movie that's so heavily CG versus a film that's more traditionally shot?
This is the main question I get, which is good. It's a vital question. There are a lot of differences, especially the technical part of it. The creative part of it there are differences, but it all comes from the same ether of ideas -- things that are related to story. None of that changes. Baloo's cave should look a certain way, regardless if I had done all of it or not in physical form.
That was the one we almost built entirely. We built half of it, a half cave, and that was our largest set. Creatively, the essence of it comes from the same realm. It's just as difficult for both [practical and digital]. Where it diverges is, on a "real" set you have to deal with things like weather or locations. I just worked on a movie The Dark Tower where most of it's in-camera [editing], which is the opposite of The Jungle Book.
There, you're having to build things out on the field and you're having to worry about the sun and the workers having heatstroke or being bit by snakes in South Africa. On a movie like this, you're not worried about that; we're making CG snakes. [Laughs] No one knows how long Kaa really is. That's the big secret in the movie; I don't think I even know how long she is.
It's actually more difficult, ultimately, to do a movie like The Jungle Book. There are so many technical things that could go wrong, so many stages. Real weather is almost easy compared to them having to decide fake weather -- how to create it, to make it look real.
On a movie like the Jungle Book we're having to consider things that you don't normally on a "regular" movie. Pine needles, leaves, dust, dirt on the ground. We have to decide what kinds of rocks we're going to use, what kind of texture is that rock going to have, how old should it look, if weathering has occurred. The look of the tree bark. All of these have to be decided.
Everyone just thinks you can just push a button: "I'm sure they create a program and everything's an algorithm." It takes a lot of algorithms, but that does not create a realistic forest, actually. Creating something completely from algorithms does not work. You have to have real people making decisions. Working with computers isn't a shortcut; it's a big task.
I've spoken to effects people who say sometimes with the digital effects, it's almost that harrowing thing because you don't know whether what you're working on is actually working until it renders. "This works, until it doesn't."
Sometimes we're getting results days later. There's not instant gratification that you get on a normal shoot. When your shooting something that's all on camera, there's a definite result. The next day you can look at the dailies and say "oh wow, that was cool, we got it in the bag" or "Oh, wow, we made a great set."
With this movie, it's so many iterations before you see the final product. "It's almost kind of a green blob here. Now, let's go and figure it out." You have to know how it's going to look like down the pipeline. There's a whole process, with everyone involved in an iterative way. We have the [development] team, me, the supervisor of course, the editor, the animator -- all of these people are all involved from the beginning all the way through the middle and the end. It comes down to how you organize how you're going to create this movie.
If we tired to do this movie in the traditional way only, without CG, it would not have worked. If they tried to do it completely animation method, it wouldn't have worked. It's a weird hybrid of an animated movie and a live action movie. The process of making it was a complete hybrid.
I credit Jon Favreau for that. That was his idea from the get-go: "This is going to be animated. We're going to use some techniques from animation, we're going to use some techniques from live action, we're going to combine it, and that's how we're going to make this movie." And it actually worked!
I don't think it's been done on a scale like that before. I was told by the Visual Effects Producer that our movie took three years less than Avatar to complete. I don't know how many hundreds of millions fewer dollars. He also said it was four times more complicated than Avatar -- and he worked on Avatar.
I want to speak to the Avatar comparison. I feel like the biggest point for comparison there isn't even the craft but the fact that every studio in town is trying to figure out, "How am I going to do my version of this film?" It seems that the way that this movie got put together had never really been done on this scale before, but now every studio has one in development.
Right, and I've been called on some of those movies, of course.
When you're in the middle of it, you're not really thinking "Hey we're really going to change filmmaking." Some days you can step back and think like that, but some days you're just in the thick of it. You're just trying to make a good movie and you're trying to do your job. We're all working together.
I would think my advice for those other movies is to make sure you have a team that actually loves the material -- that every head of every department loves the material as much as we did.
It was a labor of love. We all loved what we were doing. We believed in every aspect of it. There's always creative differences and things that happen, obviously, but as a whole it was a good team. I think that's the hardest part, is finding good people. This movie is made by people. As much as it is digital on computers, a computer is a tool and it is used by real people doing the animating.
The animals are not remotely captured. Our movie used 99.9% key print animation -- like the old style animating, where animators actually just animate the material. There's a lot of looking at reference videos of animals to see how they moved and things. They watched movies of Christopher Walken, we didn't capture Christopher Walken's face. It's unique.
Avatar was definitely -- the motion capture was directly fed into the pipeline. It became the main basis for the character animation for that movie. Our motion capture phase it was really a blocking phase and doing a pre-shoot of a movie to figure out certain things we needed to figure out. How much set to build and how little set to build, lighting elements, stuff like that.
What was your first response when Favreau said, "here's the plan?"
I was excited. I was like, "This is cool. This is going to be crazy."
His level of what he wanted from day one was very high. I was obviously excited and anxious. I had anxiety. I hope we can pull this off. He said from the beginning the goal was to make something that had never been done before.
These animals should look like something. They should act and behave in a unique way. The world should look very realistic, in a way we haven't seen before [in animation]. That's a big, tall order.
We can get excited, and then after you get excited, you gulp and you're like "shit, what have I gotten into?" And then you're into it.
I give credit to basically everyone: Favreau and Disney and the producers of this movie for taking a chance on me. I'm a new kid on the block. I did a lot of commercials, I did some visual effects in commercials. I don't have a lot of movies under my belt. It was a huge risk. They took a chance and I'm very happy they did.
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