Hard work that went into the making of ‘ The Jungle Book’ and more

Cartoon adaptation movies has always been in the trend, what has changed now is the new found love for games and movies getting made out of them. This week is all about cartoon adaptations of movies that has been made till date. Wondering why we have raised this topic? It’s because of the jungle book movie and how it has taken the theaters by storm. If you are a 90’s kid then you can’t afford to let this one go.

Talking about the Movies that much like the jungle book who were made into live action films due to their tremendous fan base cartoon series.

Let’s take a look at some of the movies that were taken straight out of the animated series and how they performed in the silver screen? What went into their production?

Transformer

Movie budget: $151,000,000

Domestic Gross: $319,071,806

Worldwide Gross $708,098,205

(Estimated Figures)

One of the most talked about cartoon show of the previous century ‘The Transformer’. It had everything a child could dream or think off, Giant Robots fighting against each other in an epic clash of never ending warfare across the globe and in the coming seasons the war expanded to whole Universe as the concept of cyber keys were introduced. Fans loved it and had really high hopes with the film and certainly the trailer the movie was widely loved and appreciated but that was about it for Transformers, From that point everything went downhill, Sequels were bad and received a lot of flak from the hardcore fans and comic book community.

Even though the first movie earned much less compared to the upcoming sequels, it was most loved among the rest. A team of 25 artist were used to design the cars and Robots of the movie and flatbed trucks were used to transport the humongous Autobots Frenzy and Bumble bee, Oops forgot to tell you, these two Autobots were made in actual world. Creating the Auto bots and making them move about and fight was a real task, Visual effect supervisor Scott Farrar in an interview stated that, an actual study of real life cars was needed and then they pulled out 10,000 hand made models in to create the auto body of Optimus prime. Over 20,000 nodes were needed to be used to create the many forms of Bumble bee and then a serious amount of animation work was done to make the rigid body move and look muscular and recognizable to the audience.

Man of Steel

Movie Budget: $225,000,000

Domestic Gross : $291,045,518

Worldwide Gross : $667,999,518

(Estimated Figures)

A Heavy dose of CGI went into filming this Movie, Most of it was inspired from TV series adaptation of Superman Small ville. In that series superman mostly moved about and fought at 24 fps with a lot less flying involved, however the environment and the fight scene were all real locations but nothing got destroyed as the producers respected the location way too much. This wasn’t gonna be the case with Zack Snyder’s Man of steel, as he was keen to show the true power of a Kryptonian. He added CGI in ever fight Sequence, from General Zod’s Armor to Superman’s cape it was all CGI. They used a special cam which they called as enviro-cam which was a rig where they mounted a Canon 5D and a motorized nodal head, that allowed them to shoot and capture footage at 55K resolution for every single shot, Scenes were mainly shot for the span of 3 to 4 minutes. Countless Hours of Editing and CGI gave us the end product, which was all in High Definition.

Spider Man

Movie Budget : $139,000,000

Domestic Budget : $403,706,37

Worldwide : $821,706,375

Out of the many Spider man movies that were ever made, spider man of Tobey Maguire still remains to be the most loved and the most successful spider-man movie till date. We don’t know what numbers will the Marvel’s Spider Man will bring in, but that would be a story for another day. Like the above movies, Spider man animated series commanded a commendable amount of fan following, Spidey has always been a fan favorite but its Live action movie failed to bring in big numbers and impress the audiences, What magic First two version of Spider Man created was quickly killed and slain by the finale and the new “Amazing spider Man Series” thus it requires another reboot.

John Dykstra — Man Behind Spiderman Visuals

John Dykstra was the mastermind behind the visuals of the film. He had his crew to go out and research and gather data about the city of new York , its skyscrapers and more. In the first film the use of CGI and photogrammetry did the trick for creating fight sequence and more but that was all going to change in Spider Man 2 and 3. In case of Doc Octaevis and Venom, tentacles and costume were needed to be made in reality as more than one software goes into the making of a villain and managing that with the CGI was a task hard to accomplish, so instead going all CGI they worked on the costume of Spider Man, Venom and Doc Octaevis. This time John decided to make use of Spider cam which would go as high up in the air as 22 story building and then the next moment would come crashing down on the surface with a distance of a foot. This allowed them to have real pictures and footage that would go into the animation making the web slinging scenes look more real and eye popping.

Jungle book

If you are a nineties kid and you have seen the trailer, then you how far this fairy tale has come. From the low key level of animated story to the HD version of CGI marvel. It took long, but it finally made it to the big screen. It’s a movie every child should see and I know a lot of 20 + something guys are going to be watching the movie without failing. It’s a true work of art and CGI perfection at its best, it can’t get any bigger or better than this.

It took a team of 800 CGI and spent a year to design over 70 species of animals and 100 million leaves stimulating earth, fire and water for the jungle book. All of it was shot and filmed in Los Angeles with green screen on the back. Neel Sethi (12) out of 2000 people was chosen to play the role of Mowgli in the film had to use his imagination and rely on his fitness while the scenes were being shot. Sometimes a crew member would run behind him to make him feel the need of urgency.

Author: Ayank Chourasia

To read more such interesting stories, download Reacho.