For the movie Avatar, the production team used a new technology that better captures the motion of the actors: motion capture animation. Motion capture animation works through the use of sensors attached to the actors and cameras to capture the motions and facial expressions of the actors, following the sensors attached to the actors. The use of motion capture and CGI is beneficial in several ways. Instead of actors recording their voices and then a team animating the movie, syncing it with their voices, everything is happening at once, and this saves time. Everything that you are watching on the screen is entirely done by the actors, better capturing their talent as an actor. The motion capture technology better encompasses their talent as an actor, as their movements are being recorded as well as their voice. CGI technology also replaces prosthetics, saving hours of time spent doing makeup. The fact that everything is computer generated also adds to continuity. Putting on makeup or the use of props can be different every time you use them, but computer generated imaging will always be constant.

 

Pre-production was incredibly important, especially from a technology standpoint. For example, before actors will go on to the stage in their sensor suits to be filmed using motion capture, they will be placed in a sphere filled with lights and cameras to study their facial features in order to better generate their models in the computer. They record high-definition shots from a lot of angles to capture the subtle nuances of the actors during the filming, to help them generate a better 3D model during editing. Since the equipment they were using was very advanced and expensive, pre production was incredibly important. One of the challenges they faced was capturing the facial expressions of the actors. They did this by rigging a camera from the sensor suit of the actors that got a shot of their face. They painted dots on the face of the actors that will be used in the editing process to capture the facial expressions of the actors. The behind the scenes of Avatar was really interesting to me because it incorporated something that hadn’t been done before.

As far as the set goes, almost everything was done in a studio. In fact, there weren’t many practical effects. The designers were tasked with creating an entire world in a set. The planet the movie takes place on, Pandora, is a jungle. Every natural feature is “amped up.” The mountains are bigger, the waterfalls are taller, and the valleys are deeper. A lot of CGI was used to generate the images we see on the screen. The design team took inspiration from exotic plants and animals to create the living things in the movie. The director, James Cameron, pushed his design team to design Pandora to be beautiful, yet deadly. The crew built about 25 sets, and built about 40,000 square feet of floor area, not including the rainforest the crew built to film the scenes outside. The behind the scenes of Avatar took a tremendous amount of effort to coordinate, pre production was incredibly important, and the sets the crew built to accommodate the technology used to film were impressive.