Can I just describe the recreated Disney's The Jungle Book to you in one word…WOW. I got the chance to see the behind the scenes effects and wow, wow, wow…the effects that go on to create this masterpiece are seriously incredible. Good news for all of you, Disney's The Jungle Book is out on blu-ray today, August 30th!
Curious about the details of what you don't see on screen? Yes, of course you are! I would be, too. 🙂 Check out my Q&A with “The Jungle Book’s” producer, Brigham Taylor and visual effect supervisor, Rob Legato.
The Jungle Book's modern recreation is nothing less than astonishing. The digitally photographed images and videos presents the resplendent jungle areas with an impressive complexity of detail and realism. Rough terrain -- grassy, muddy, everything in between -- is matched only by the intimacy of the scars, blood, and caked-on dirt on the main characters skin. It all looks so real. It is hard for me to even fathom how they do it. Watching the blu-ray behind the scenes addition gave me so much insight.
I was amazed that these animal were not real!! They look SO real. But, nope they just used digital effects, including digital animal fur which is very complex and reacts to the slightest touch, breeze, or movement to make it look real.
The images, the colors, the character features everything is so life like. The movie is mainly based on the color of natural green, which is varied and vibrant and very pleasing to the eyes. This is just another fun fact you'll learn in the blu-ray edition.
One thing I found really interesting the blu-ray was how the casting was done! Watch below. 🙂
You might be curious how did they decide what actually made it on this exception blu-ray...I've got the answer straight from the sources. 😉
How did you decide what makes it to the bonus footage on blu-ray?
Brigham Taylor: The trick is you try to capture everything and seasoned filmmakers, like we had on this film, Jon included, brought in a crew very early on just because we felt this was going to be an interesting process and project so we were capturing stuff at every key point throughout so that we would have options and you kind of get it all. We have a great team at Disney that produces this stuff and so they come back and start to say, because they have fresh perspective in saying this was really fascinating.
This was fascinating and luckily we have material to support all of that so it’s a dialogue about we’ll give you everything and I think we’re a very user-friendly production and then Disney says wouldn’t it be great if we looked at this, that, and in this case, I think there was enough to talk about that they were able to produce a nice piece like this which was kind of going above and beyond because it’s a really fun visual narrative to making this movie. So, luckily we had just sort of grabbed everything. It’s hard to decide at the beginning of the process what is going to be interesting but you do know when you go to New Orleans and you have Chris and you have Bill and you have Jon, you know you’re going to cover that. But in this case, we tried to kind of cover everything from behind-the-scenes perspective.
Rob Legato: Yeah and the behind-the-scenes team at Disney actually was the ones that just really knew, getting all this material and they were coming up just like an audience member, I didn’t know you did it that way and they were being enthusiastic about it and any time, I mean there’s always a regret when we do this stuff because you wish to document it after it worked, but while you’re doing it you’re under tight pressure to get it done. You don’t know if it’s going to work or not. You don’t want to look like an idiot and so you don’t give it the, kind of the due where you really, let’s stage this almost for a camera so people kind of do it.
We never do that. We’re just like, ‘Oh my God, we’re going to lose it in 10 minutes, let’s get this shot and you’re done.’ It’s like, ‘Oh that would have been cool to record.’
In my opinion this is truly a wonderful presentation from Disney!
Make sure to check out the official trailer below. 🙂
The Jungle Book is available on Blu-ray™ today, August 30. Follow along with the hashtag #JungleBookBluray!
Disclosure: I attended this trip courtesy of Disney. However, all thoughts and opinions are 100% my own!
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