Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/6359
H OLLYWOOD — After years in the making and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, James Cameron's dream of taking filmmaking to the next level has become a reality. The individual components of Avatar — ad- venture/love story, visual effects, motion-capture technology and 3D — have all existed before, but arguably, this is the first time these elements have been so deftly integrated in this way. And never has such an epic ambition been so singu- larly controlled by one man's individual vision. Cameron just may be responsible for a new era in modern digital cinema: find- ing a way to make non-human characters more human with advances in every as- pect of digital filmmaking. When I asked Cameron why it took hundreds of million dollars of talent and technology to make a love story, he laughed. "Well it's an adventure. It's a science- fiction film, a fantasy film. It takes place on another planet.The characters are non- human, so it couldn't be done with actors and make-up." Cameron wasn't interested in "redefining gluing rubber on to actor's faces." He was interested in finding a way for non-human characters to express humanness. His vision was to see non-human, CG characters believably reveal human emo- tions on screen. Cameron says creating the world of Avatar and its people started even before there was a stor y. "We were going down the road of performance capture and computer generated character creation, and that was one of the stated goals of the film. In fact that was one of the stated goals before the story. [Even when] I was the CEO of Digital Domain I was looking for a way to push my team at the time...to go beyond what was possible then in terms of computer generated crea- ture and character creation." Years were spent developing a high-resolution performance capture system that could faithfully reproduce the fidelity and subtly of an actor's live performance at the level that Cameron was looking for."I wasn't interested in being an animator," he explains. "I wasn't interested in making an animated movie. Animation is a tool of these films. I wanted the character to be created by the actor, owned by the actor. I wanted it to be transparent from my perspective as a director that the perfor- mance that I got with the actor that day is ultimately what the character would do." E D I T I N G ' S N E W R O L E "Jim was originally going to edit the whole thing himself," recalls editor John Re- foua [Balls of Fury], "but after a little while he realized that with all the work and di- recting, it was going to be too much. He called me to come in for six weeks and that was two and a half years ago. "This is such a different movie," continues Refoua. "It's not like a normal picture, where the editor does this, the director does that." He notes that the way things are put together, the production and post production depar tments "aren't sepa- rate, so the director is in the middle of everything. Editorial," he says, "is very inte- grated into the production side because of the motion capture." When editor Stephen Rivkin (Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy) came on board, one of the first things Cameron did was show him the new technology he was using on Avatar. "My mouth just dropped open," he says. "I looked at this knowing that if they wanted me I was hooked.This was something I had never seen before: cutting-edge virtual production. On Pirates, we had actors in gray suits with mark- ers all over them and they were on a live-action set interacting with other live ac- tors. Avatar is a whole other level of performance capture. "This is taking actors, putting them in capture suits on a blank stage and captur- ing their performances, editing their performances, and building them together," he continues. "Sometimes stitching pieces of performances together in the same take, so that Jim can ultimately put a camera on them and photograph them from any angle and play back the identical performance." Think about the possibilities, he says, normally you would have the classic editing dilemma:"Well the actor was really good in this angle, but it's out of focus, or I wish I had that performance in the close-up.This is no longer an issue because you can play back that performance and create any shot you want, shoot as many takes as you need, without an actor getting tired, and always delivering the best they had in the entire process of capture." Cameron recalls,"The hardest thing for us to get our minds around was the fact that we were editing before we had shots. So in a way it was all infinite possibility; you had this great performance, but you don't have the shots yet. So deciding which par t of the performance might be the right moment for that close-up is a different thing than knowing you've got a close-up that you like. So as an editor, it James Cameron and the film's editors discuss the process. By Daniel Restuccio Avatar introduces a new era in filmmaking Editor Stephen Rivkin calls Avatar "a whole other level of performance capture."