FJ-HRN-007

"My task is to design the look of the film. So really everything you see on the screen. The characters. The environments the characters are in. The lighting design.. everything on the screen – I’m responsible for."

"Yea. In the beginning – I work really closely to those of the head of the departments. Like.. Rex and Malana and Rob to work on the character. We all know going in what the expectation is for this character – we knew we wanted to make a very cartoony film with a lot of squash and stretch in our characters. So when the characters were designed, there was a a theory that we had that our character designer felt was really important and that was if you don’t design a real looking lion, you don’t expect it to move like a real lion. And I think that’s why the design of the characters work really well with how they move. And why we’re able to have such freedom in our animation style. Because they’re not anatomically correct. You don’t feel like bones are snapping. Or you know – It makes sense together. So that collaboration is important and it’s the same with the sets. With Philippe Gluckman who’s the CG supervisor and makes it possible to get this all in the computer. He and I have MANY conversations. I’m heated you know about like ‘I want this – I want you know a hundred plants in the jungle and he’s like ‘well, I think I can give you 60’… haha… and we always have these creative discussions about whats important you know and what isn’t and just trying to get that vision of what we have up there in the theaters in the end. "

"The squash and stretch part of the characters was a real technological advancement. And then for me just making sure that what we intended, vision-wise in the beginning, made it onto the screen in the end and making sure our consistency was there design-wise during the process. “