Filming Aᴠᴀᴛᴀʀ 2 – Tʜᴇ Wᴀʏ ᴏꜰ Wᴀᴛᴇʀ

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…at James Cameron’s Lightstorm studio in LA with producer/COO Jon Landau.

It’s been a long time in the making, and the trailer should be coming out later this week. Brought the kids to play with the virtual camera that Jim uses to see a real-time rendering of the action. It is one of their breakthrough technologies; the camera has no lens, just an LCD screen and three reflector balls that use the same sensor array that captures the actors’ motions to know where the camera is and where it is pointing (photo of it below). That position information is run through an effects switcher, which generates low-resolution CG versions of both the actors and the environment of Pandora to the virtual cam’s screen in real time.

This allows Cameron to shoot the scene as the performance occurs, or he can reshoot any scene by walking through the empty soundstage with the device after the actors were gone, capturing different camera angles as the scene replayed. Jon suggested that this infinite edit capacity allows for great flexibility, but it also can afford indefinite delays as a perfectionist bent can take over. For one scene, Jim moved over 200 trees and bushes by hand long after the performance capture. And so, the project has faced many delays. I caught a video of the rig in action.

I asked if deep sea footage has worked its way into the budget, like the sub dive did for Titanic. Jon smiled and suggested that the Avatar sequels will explore multiple tribes of Pandora, some under water. The oceans are Jim’s passion and influenced the organic forms and color palette of the first movie. In Avatar 2, they will explore the oceans of Pandora, with a nod to the master navigator cultures of Micronesia. There are some good humans and some bad humans; and there are some good Na’vi and some evil Na’vi. Their philosophy is that great movies have a message, so we should expect further celebration of environmental conservation and cultural diversity.

From the forthcoming trailer: “I know one thing, wherever we go, this family is our fortress,” the voice says as footage of a pregnant Na’vi appears. A nice touch for a Mother’s Day debut.

2 responses to “Filming Aᴠᴀᴛᴀʀ 2 – Tʜᴇ Wᴀʏ ᴏꜰ Wᴀᴛᴇʀ”

jurvetson

May 4, 2022 at 11:39 pm

My daughter is using Jim Cameron’s virtual camera that renders the scene in real time as we navigate through Pandora. Each of the balls on his black suit, and the three balls on the virtual camera rig are covered with glass spheres, so they reflect light back at the source. Above us (and visible at the very top of this photo) are a ring of sensors that record the location of all of the glass balls. Each prop is festooned with retro-reflector balls for the rendering engine. The physical forms here are only important for their size, so for guns, bows and swords, the actors do not move them into impossible places. The actual forms are rendered from 3D models, just like the musculo-skeletal rigging of the Na’vi themselves — the man in balck retro-reflector suit, and the actors suits:

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jurvetson

May 4, 2022 at 11:58 pm

and from my first encounter with Cameron, the personal backstory: “I grew up on a steady diet of sci fi, reading on the hour-long bus ride each way to school. I did not have any video games growing up. I was not saturated in media landscapes. When I read books, I had to create the images in my head.” (ironic recursion)
“At 15, I decided I wanted to be a scuba diver. I lived in Canada, 600 miles from the ocean. So, I went to Buffalo across the border to get certified, in a YMCA swimming pool, in the middle of the winter. I had never seen the ocean, and first saw it two years later when we moved to California.”
“And now I have spent 3000 hours underwater, with 500 of that in subs.”
"Secretly I wanted to dive to the wreck of the Titanic, and that’s why I made the movie. I talked them into funding an expedition. They did not know it, but that’s the truth. And then I found myself 2.5 miles underwater in a Russian sub, and it was like my sci fi dreams.""
“Avatar was 4.5-year period. We became family. The ocean organisms came to land for Pandora.”
“For an international audience, you have to connect visually and emotionally and not conceptually or in a culturally located way.”
“Curiosity — it’s the most powerful thing you own. Imagination can manifest a reality.”
“In Apollo, they are famous for saying failure is not an option. But failure has to be an option. In art and exploration, it’s a leap of faith. In whatever you’re doing, failure is an option. But fear is not.”

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Filming Aᴠᴀᴛᴀʀ 2 – Tʜᴇ Wᴀʏ ᴏꜰ Wᴀᴛᴇʀ

2 responses to “Filming Aᴠᴀᴛᴀʀ 2 – Tʜᴇ Wᴀʏ ᴏꜰ Wᴀᴛᴇʀ”

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