Avatar's More Than Just A Movie
It’s not often that a movie studio is willing to fork over more than $300-million for a sci-fi feature film, especially one that was written more than 15 years ago. That is unless that film was written by superstar director James Cameron, who wrote the script to the movie Avatar and waited for technology to catch up so that he would make his film look real, not like some Lost in Space re-creation.
Cameron wanted to take digital effects to the next level in an effort to make Pandora, the world where the movie takes place, and the characters in it, life-like. Making this a reality called for a series of new technologies to be used, including performance-capture and live action 3D. Using software solutions like Autodesk’s MotionBuilder (usa.autodesk.com), Cameron and his crew outfitted the actors in the film with black bodysuits covered in roughly 80 metallic spots, using infrared cameras to track the metallic markers, capturing body motion. Using special rendering technology, Cameron would not see the actors through his camera lens, but rather the 10-foot tall characters—or “Avatars”—in real-time.
“We could not have done this film without Autodesk technology,” says Avatar producer Jon Landau. Cameron used a special “virtual camera,” a flat panel screen with a series of knobs to display real-time images resulting from extensive behind-the-scenes work by more than 20 specialists who assured the software was working seamlessly to assure the body motion of the Avatars mimicked—in detail—that of the human actors. To make this happen, the production crew made plaster casts of each performer’s head to construct a custom harness designed to hold a tiny camera used to monitor their face, recording every muscle movement in exacting detail. Those images were then used to map the Avatar’s face in Motion Builder.
To push the boundaries even more, the team used simulcam software (dartfish.com) to merge the motion-capture footage with that of live-action footage filmed in New Zealand, providing a life-like backdrop for the film. Using all of these technologies, Cameron was able to blur the line between what is real and imagined, all while cutting production times dramatically from weeks to seconds—that’s time compression.—KMK
