If you've seen Disney's The Lion King on Broadway, it's likely that you've never seen anything else quite like it. The costumes, the choreography, the music, the set design, and the elaborate puppets add up to a singular, mind-blowing experience.
But even if you've seen the show from the best seat in the house, you haven’t seen anything like the new VR video of the show’s opening number. If you're in the show, or if you've viewed your fair share of VR content, you've still never seen anything like this. So, you should watch it. It's free. You can view it on Google Cardboard via YouTube 360 on an Android device, the Littlstar app on iOS and Android, Vrideo on Android, or on a Samsung Gear VR headset via MilkVR. You can also view it on a desktop or tablet browser, but the headset route is really the way to go for the full effect.
Disney Theatrical Productions says the 360-degree immersive video of "The Circle of Life" in New York's Minskoff Theater marks the first time anyone's recorded a live show in a Broadway theater for virtual reality. (Yes, we are aware of the debate over calling 360 video VR. We're calling it VR.) Disney didn't record the entire show, but the cast and crew ran through five and a half performances of the opener for the shoot. (The half-run was the result of an audio glitch.)
The film crew used a relatively small rig of six GoPro cameras it moved around the stage between takes. That lets viewers feel like they're moving around within the performance. Through clever cuts between locations—in front of Tshidi Manye as she sings the opening lines, behind the stage facing the audience, in the wings as gazelles prepare to run onstage, atop Pride Rock as Rafiki raises Simba—it's as if you're teleporting from spot to spot.
In the realm of virtual reality, those cuts are unique. In ways, they’re risky; jumping around in a VR video can decrease the sense of immersion. But it works here, largely because there’s so much to see. The costumes, choreography, and music provide layers of eye and ear candy—and if you’re scared of heights, make sure to refrain from looking down while you’re at the top of Pride Rock. It's a steep drop.
Craig Gilbert, co-founder of production company Total Cinema 360 and the director and producer of the piece, says all the gambles were calculated. He and Total Cinema 360 co-founder Adrian Vasquez de Velasco considered giving the viewer manual control over jumping from stage location to stage location within the piece. Ultimately, they decided "the intention behind the choreography would have been lost."
“To me, this is an ambitious piece, a one-of-a-kind piece,” says Gilbert. “Not just because it’s the first time we’re doing a Broadway show, but I think in terms of the language of storytelling in virtual reality, it’s really sort of pushing the limits... We wanted to shy away from just putting a camera in the middle and letting it roll. Following the action of the song, which is already such a dynamic and vibrant piece of music, and the absolutely legendary choreography, gave us a really broad canvas to work with.”
From a director’s standpoint, live theater may seem like a perfect match for VR. After all, in VR video actors move and interact more like they do in a play than in a movie. Things happen simultaneously and dialogue is performed in real-time. But Gilbert says it wasn’t so simple. They didn't want to drop a camera rig onstage and tell the actors to do their thing. Total Cinema 360 worked with resident dance supervisor Ruthlyn Salomons and production stage manager Ron Vodicka to recalibrate the opening number with VR in mind.
“Live theater is still designed for a different audience,” Gilbert says. “You’re seeing flat staging in front of you, all the information is presented forward. It’s designed for a single direction ... We worked to make sure we were optimizing each facet of the production for virtual reality. In some cases, that meant cheating the performers a couple of feet in a certain direction, other times it meant adjusting the lighting so that we weren’t blowing out one of the lenses. And then we did some things in the mix where it sounds like you have proximity to the performers. If you’re standing right next to someone and they’re flapping their wings, you want that to sound like you’re next to them.”
Gilbert says the goal was to make viewers feel they are part of the performance, with the ability to travel to areas inaccessible to those in the audience and even some of the actors. Just three actors climb Pride Rock during the performance, so the vantage point 20 feet above the stage is new to many performers. Gilbert says he’s been surprised to hear some viewers say the behind-the-scenes shot from the wings was among their favorites. The team shot one run-through from the audience, but felt jumping to that viewpoint would diminish the immersive feel.
What’s more, Total Cinema 360 shot the whole thing blind: There was no live-stream from the camera rig to any tablets or monitors backstage, and the first time they saw any of the footage was in post-production. “We sort of joke that it’s like when you record in film stock, and you have to send it all off to the lab and get your dailies,” Gilbert says. “We always do a rough stitch so that you can see everything immediately after we shoot. But we don’t see it till after we capture it.”
Gilbert hopes the end result serves as a blueprint for future VR videos. "We think this could be what live theater in virtual reality can be going forward,” he says.
Not everyone is convinced that should be the case. Georgia Tech associate dean and professor Janet Murray, author of Hamlet on the Holodeck and an expert on digital storytelling, says she thinks a project like this is an important evolutionary step for VR. But it's just a baby step, and further evolution will need to wait for technology and creative vision to catch up. In a way, she thinks it's too open-ended.
"This is just VR photography of a stage event whose spectacle only works because of its precision theatrical staging for the people who are actually there," Murray says. "A storyteller who is focused on the affordances of VR as a medium in its own right... would focus on staging the action to keep the interactor enclosed in the fictional space by reinventing a fourth wall boundary that is not the conventional stage frame... A successful VR spectacle, even if it were only composed of a headset and no gesture tracking, would have to be interactive, luring the interactor to look in particular places at particular times and rewarding them with dramatic payoff."
Disney Theatrical Productions itself was hesitant going into the project, but the end result subdued any doubts. “Of everyone on the team here, I think I was the most skeptical,” says Andrew Flatt, senior vice president of marketing at Disney Theatrical Productions. The company is fiercely protective of its IP, especially with something so successful as The Lion King, which has been running for 18 years. "We did go forward with the knowledge that it was an experiment, and that if we went through the filming and editing process and we didn’t love what we saw, or it somehow didn’t enhance or improve upon or expand upon Julie Taymor’s original vision of The Lion King, then we weren’t going to release it.”
Disney also worried that if the VR experience was too good, it would cannibalize ticket sales to the live show. But Flatt says VR projects by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and others convinced them to put those doubts to rest. Once they saw a rough cut, Disney knew it had something special. "When push comes to shove and you see the actual video, I think it really does the opposite,” Flatt says. “It whets an appetite, it makes you want to see more, it makes you want to get a little deeper into this production.”
While virtual-reality headsets are still trying to crack the mainstream—the first hard-core consumer models hit the market next year—Total Cinema 360 started making 360-degree immersive movies in 2013. But Gilbert says he's long hoped for a project like this. “Doing musical theater, doing live theater, let alone The Lion King on Broadway, has been a dream of mine since the first time we’d ever picked up a 360 camera,” Gilbert says. “I was born and raised a New Yorker and a theater fanatic, so the moment we got the opportunity to do this, I tried to explain to them that they couldn’t possibly be in more loving hands.”
That care and creativity was evident to Tshidi Manye, who sings the lead in “Circle of Life” and plays Rafiki. She says the VR experience blew her away, because it gave her a new perspective on the production, a new way of seeing the audience respond, and a new appreciation for what she gets to do.
“I teared up, I cried," she says. "It was emotions of joy, and I was just so grateful to watch this unfold... The way it’s done is beyond anything I’ve seen. This for me, it’s a wake-up call. Being able to watch the audience, and see them responding, that to me is worth everything.”
