As you may have heard, the Disney classic The Lion King is getting a live-action adaptation helmed by Jon Favreau, the same guy behind Disney’s recent real-life re-imagining of The Jungle Book. Disney has incorporated live-action remakes into their arsenal increasingly over the past few years—the forthcoming Beauty and the Beast, for instance—and has begun to incorporate virtual reality technology into such productions. Apparently, The Lion King is a few leaps beyond the status quo. Favreau told our friend Jenna Busch at ComingSoon.net that The Lion King will make even further use of the technology because of how fast it has developed for the consumer market.

Favreau said he first became interested in VR in terms of filmmaking when he watched The Blue, a VR meeting with a blue whale, at a tech startup:

I’d gone over at lunch just to see what the new VR technology was, and by the end of it, we were starting to try to figure out how to use VR in shot design. It’s kind of like if you have a person wearing the HMD, wearing the visor, [if it] is the audience member, you write code one way, but if that person is the camera, you’re using the same tools, but you’re kind of changing the work flow so that you’re using it to build the footage, as opposed to using the VR to observe the footage or experience the content. So what’s nice is that there’s so much innovation in this area, so much investment in these technologies, and they are really helpful.

Favreau spoke more about how VR could potentially be used by both film creators and film viewers, so find the rest of that conversation here, and keep an eye out for Disney’s next live-action remake, Beauty and the Beast, which stars Emma Watson and Dan Stevens as the leads, and hits theaters on March 17.

Featured image: Disney

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