You and Barry also went on a ‘virtual road trip’ with local scouts and production teams on the ground in Africa helping to find locations. How did that work?
The way the viewer experiences our world is as if it’s photo real. The process is CG animation—every landscape is built rock by rock, leaf by leaf. We had people looking around in different places. A couple of times a week, we’d Zoom with people in the field, who were mostly travelling by car in rural areas, so covid-wise it was ok. Once we’d decided the places for the journey, the process was to then collect a lot of photogrammetry, where every rock, leaf and stick was scanned and photographed, so it could be recreated.”
Where does Mufasa’s journey begin?
He starts in a very arid landscape, based on Kaokoland in Namibia. That’s Mufasa’s home and the place where he last saw his parents. At the start of the story, Mufasa is orphaned, based on a desert flash flood that washes him away from where he’s born and lands him somewhere where he’s going to grow up, where he meets Taka (Scar). I wanted that place to feel idyllic, so the realm of Obasi in our story is the Okavango Delta, which is one of the most remarkable places I’ve ever been, a place that’s desert half the year and floodplain half the year, a place that has incredible abundance for much of the time and incredible harmony.
There’s a big scene on a giant waterfall. Which place did you draw on?
Victoria Falls. The characters run from the Okavango, which empties into river basins that take you to the falls. He’s washed away into Zambia and then gets to the lower part of Tanzania.
Have you been to Victoria Falls, aka Mosi-oa-Tunya (“the smoke that thunders”)?
Yes, and I definitely wouldn’t jump off, which one of our characters is forced to do. Our Falls has two rivers meeting, so it’s a double mirror image of Victoria Falls. The place we focused on is the Boiling Pot, a place that you don’t think you’d survive, a place that has an incredible amount of churn, which creates a lot of atmosphere.
