Avatar, the new 3-D blockbuster from director James Cameron, represents a quantum leap in movie-making technology. The truly impressive part of the production was the real-world technology that powered the stunning special effects. How did they do it?
Stereoscopic 3D Fusion Camera System
For over a decade, James Cameron has been fascinated with the prospect of using 3D in his movies. His first aspiration for the technology was to create a movie about Mars exploration that would symbolize NASA’s Mars ambitions. At the time, stereoscopic 3D camera systems were the size of refrigerators and could weigh close to 500 pounds.
Cameron issued a challenge to one of his partners, Vince Pace: Develop a quiet, lightweight 3D camera for a movie I want to do. That was seven years ago, and the result is stunning – the new Fusion Camera System. Considered the most advanced camera system ever designed, it was used to “run the stitches” between live action scenes and computer generated scenes.
Performance Capture
Computer generated imagery (CGI) was used extensively in Avatar. CGI was first introduced on the big screen for background scenery in Cameron’s 1990’s summer blockbuster, Total Recall. Using CGI to graphically enhance human movements was trickier, however, and was first used a year later in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
For Avatar, though, Cameron wanted something more than what CGI could provide. Under Cameron’s direction, his team developed a new technique named “image-based facial performance capture”, which required the actors to wear special headgear equipped with a camera. The video of the actor’s face is rendered at an almost pore-by-pore level, and the result was the astonishing emotional authenticity displayed by the Na’avi characters.
Digital animation
Avatar’s animation renderings were provided by Peter Jackson’s digital-effects studio Weta Digital. A large team of artists worked nonstop to transfer the renderings to photo-realistic images using innovative techniques in lighting, shading, and rendering. No detail was left out –Jackson’s computers rendered rock, tree and leaf individually. The entire process took over a year to complete and over a petabyte (one thousand terabytes) of hard drive space.
Virtual Camera/Simul-Cam
Two other new Cameron inventions, the Virtual Camera and the Simul-Cam, combined the CGI and 3D technologies for Avatar. The simul-cam integrated CGI based characters and environments into the Fusion eyepiece, enabling Cameron to virtually direct CGI scenes just as we would a live action scene.
The virtual camera is not so much a camera as a controller. Cameron used it to simulate a camera that was fed CGI data by the supercomputers, thereby allowing him to judge the overall effect on the final cut.
Avatar cost $430 million to produce and market. It launched last week with an estimated $232.2 million in worldwide ticket sales, making it the largest grossing debut ever for a movie that wasn't a sequel.
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