Veteran director and writer Jon Favreau revealed he fully integrated Apple Vision Pro into the production pipeline for his upcoming Star Wars film coming out this May, The Mandalorian and Grogu.
Speaking to The Town’s Matt Belloni on stage at CinemaCon in Las Vegas this week, Favreau revealed he regularly used Vision Pro while filming The Mandalorian and Grogu, the upcoming Star Wars film which will be the first to hit cinemas in seven years.
“So I’m making an IMAX movie and I’m looking at a TV screen. No matter how big your TV screen is, it’s not an IMAX screen,” Favreau says, describing directing from traditional on-set monitors.
But Favreau saw the potential to leverage Vision Pro to drive a pre-production mocap and the pre-vis pipeline, he says, which included building a piece of software from scratch to view on-set action in a larger format.
“We built software so that I could pop on my Apple Vision Pro and be sitting in an IMAX movie theater and see the full aspect ratio when we’re lining a shot up and I could watch that take and see what people will see,” Favreau explains.
“There’s so much great consumer-facing tech that could be utilized for film making in just the planning process. Forget about whether you show it in the show it in the movie theaters on the big screen. That’s going to help collapse costs and it’s going to also help you get more precise creatively. And this is what the animation industry has understood from the beginning. Get it right before you ever paint a cell.”
Notably, Favreau’s television production company Golem Creations was behind a host of Star Wars shows filmed for Disney+, including The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, Ahsoka, and Star Wars: Skeleton Crew.
Besides having the requisite Star Wars chops, Favreau is also no stranger to VR. In his 2016, he produced two 360 promotional videos for The Jungle Book (2016) using Nokia’s OZO 360 camera rig.
That same year, Favreau’s Golem Creations partnered with WEVR to create Gnomes & Goblins (2020), an admittedly not-great fantasy adventure for PC VR that did manage to push the visual envelope at the time.
Concurrent to production on Gnomes & Goblins, Favreau also began using VR directly in the film production pipeline with The Lion King (2019), which used HTC Vive headsets to pre-visualize the scene, characters, and animations—something to make it easier to line up shots, rethink lighting, and make other changes as if the virtual set was entirely real.
You can catch the full interview below, timestamped during his chat on Vision Pro:
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