This allowed the Avatar team to use a much larger capture environment, or “Volume,” than had ever been used before.  At six times the size of previous capture volumes, the Volume for Avatar was used to capture live galloping horses, stunts requiring elaborate wire rigging, and even aerial dogfights between aircraft and flying creatures. 

So the revolutionary head-rigs were the key not only to the subtlest nuances of the characters’ emotions, but also to the film’s grandest spectacle.

Another innovation created especially for Avatar was the Virtual Camera, which allowed Cameron to shoot scenes within his computer-generated world, just as if he were filming on a Hollywood soundstage.   Through this virtual camera, the director would see not Zoë Saldana, but her 10-foot tall blue-skinned character, Neytiri. 

Instead of Sam Worthington and Sigourney Weaver, he would see their giant blue avatars, complete with tails and huge golden eyes.  And instead of the austere gray space of the Volume, he would see the lush rainforest of Pandora, or perhaps the floating Hallelujah Mountains, or the human colony at Hell’s Gate.

After working out the details of how to exactly capture the actor’s performances, the next step was to enlist the aid of Peter Jackson’s Academy Award-winning visual effects powerhouse WETA Digital, in New Zealand. 

WETA’s groundbreaking photo-real characters like Gollum in the “Lord of the Rings,” and the utterly real-seeming King Kong, led Cameron to believe that they could breathe life into his Na’vi characters.

It was critical to Cameron from the beginning that every detail of the actors’ performances be preserved in the final CG character as they appear on the screen.  WETA assured him that their team of world-class animators would make it their mission to convey one hundred percent of the actors’ performances to their Na’vi or avatar characters. 

This involved insuring that highly accurate data be recorded at the moment the scene was performed, and it also required over a year of work by the animation team to create the “rigs” that allowed the CG characters to emote exactly like the actors whose performance they were mirroring.

Avatar is released 17th December.

Tagged in