You Know The Main Problem With Thelive Action Lion King? Why It Looks So Lifeless?

You know the main problem with the “live action” Lion King? Why it looks so lifeless?

The hyper realistic style is actually limiting the animators, rather than freeing them. The style makes it much harder to have memorable character designs and good expressions. Real lions don’t need to do things like emote in a way that humans can understand – but characters in a film do. The original movie was more cartoony not due to animation limitations of the time, but because that style genuinely serves the story better.

To show you what I mean, compare these two shots of Simba, from right after Scar says “run away and never return.”

Here is a clear reaction, with a strong beat for us to connect with before the character makes a decision. Even without any dialogue, even without any context, you can understand the emotion there just by the expression and the mannerisms. Is it realistic? No! He’s bright yellow and has eyebrows. But do we empathize with him? Yes!

Meanwhile, here is… a lion. Turning and running. No expression, no beats, no character moments, nothing. He actually can’t express himself because the animators are locked into the realistic style. If they tried to animate a strong expression as warranted for the scene, it would look terrible. Is it realistic? Hell yeah! Look at those textures! Look at that fur! But do we empathize with him? …nah. Not really.

To conclude: when you’re retelling Hamlet with a bunch of animated lions, cartoonish-ness is your friend, not your enemy.

Lighting Graveyard:

Who's that control board?!

It's NSI MC 7008!

Down in the sump room and found this old beauty.

Back in the day when you could literally hard print the operating instructions on the bottom of the console, instead of needing to download a 250 page PDF.

Stick it to "The Big Oil Man"- Canadian Edition.

Fill up to a round number plus one or two cents.

Pay in cash.

"Free" gas, one overpriced, world-destroying drop at a time.

(For non Canucks, we cancelled the penny a while ago. Debit/Credit is billed to the cent. Cash payments are rounded up or down to the nearest nickel.)

Garwik: Once, a coworker left his phone unlocked, so I picked it up, did an image search for "Hairy Butts" and left the page open for him to find.

Me, laughing: I think that's some form of harassment?

Garwik: More like Hair-Ass-ment!

And then I left him.

To go to work.

Link is Super Handy for just that. Or you can just Move To all the momentarily unwanted cues to some distant number range.

There's also the sweet "Load earlier save file version" ability that the audio guy is very jealous of.

But! In this case?

It honestly didn't need 60 cues, it's a "Shaw Play". One location. One room. In Real Time. In the middle of the day.

We might have to break out Battleship over headset to pass the time.

With/Without Directors.

Lighting LD Levels:

In attendance: Lighting Designer, Assistant Lighting Designer, Lighting Board Operator (me).

Five hours of programming subtle, half minute shifts in looks as characters enter and exit and move around the stage.

————Next Day————

Lighting LX 1:

In attendance: Lighting Designer, Assistant Lighting Designer, Lighting Board Operator (me). Director, Assistant Director, Stage Manager, Light Walker.

LD: Talking with Director. Comes on Comm: “… Delete cues 8 through 60.”

Subtlety be damned. One look for an hour.

/sigh.

TOO MUCH ADVENTURE.

MIRED IN ADVENTURE.

SEVERELY UNDERESTIMATED ADVENTURE.

Easter Monday, 2019

Got a call to assist my stage manager from “The Orchard (after Chekov)” last year. Raccoon had got stuck in one of her compost bins. Sorted that out, but now I was dressed and in Niagara-on-the-Lake.

The weather was beautiful, all the summer bikers were out and about. Decided since I was outside, I might as well have an adventure. There’s an ATV track that runs parallel to Concession 1 Road.