10 CAMERON USED CUTTING EDGE CAMERA TECHNOLOGY TO GET THE REALISTIC EFFECT HE WANTED
Avatar's use of cutting-edge special effects is one of the many reasons the film did incredibly well at the box office. Avatar featured the most life-like CGI characters that had ever been seen on the big screen. Cameron achieved the effect he wanted with the use of virtual camera technology.
According to the New York Times, he employed a combination of motion sensors attached to the actors and tiny facial cameras attached to their heads to capture the actors’ minutest facial expressions and movements. The result was the most photorealistic characters ever created, raising the standards for films that use CGI.
9 THERE'S ONE BIG REASON IT TOOK THIS LONG FOR A SEQUEL
Instead of having the action take place largely above ground as it did in the first film, most of Avatar 2 will take place underwater. Underwater shooting presents difficulties even in live-action. Cameron had to wait until he'd figured out how to create something that looked as groundbreaking as the original did.
Speaking to Collider in 2017, he revealed he finally had: "Basically, whenever you add water to any problem, it just gets ten times harder. So, we’ve thrown a lot of horsepower, innovation, imagination and new technology at the problem, and it’s taken us about a year and a half now to work out how we’re going to do it... And we’re getting really good data, beautiful character motion and great facial performance capture. We’ve basically cracked the code."
8 MICROSOFT CREATED BRAND NEW TECHNOLOGY FOR THE FILM
James Cameron’s ambitions for Avatar required sophisticated technology, so he went to Microsoft for the necessary computing technology he would need to complete the film. He brought them on early in the process and they developed a Digital Asset Management system Cameron’s team dubbed “Gaia”, which served to host all the digital metadata and content generated during the extensive shoot.
Essentially, the entire film was turned into an unprecedented amount of data that required the creation of the software Microsoft built from the ground up, exclusively for Cameron’s project. Speaking to Microsoft, producer Jon Landau didn’t understate the system’s importance: "Without Gaia, we would not have been able to do the production. Gaia was the backbone that everything else ran on top of."
7 IT TOOK AN INSANE AMOUNT OF TIME TO RENDER
Because of the massive amount of data generated by Cameron’s cameras and motion capture technology, they required some serious computer power to render the data once it was shot. The production team used Weta Digital, a New Zealand-based company co-founded by Peter Jackson that worked on the Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong.
According to an article in Geek.com, the company has a 10,000 square foot server farm that houses 40,000 processors along with 104 terabytes of memory using 10 GB networking adapters. With all of that computing power running 24/7, it still took hours to process one single frame of film. There are 24 frames per second of film, so you can see what a gargantuan task it was to render the film.
6 THE SCORE WAS UNIQUELY CHALLENGING TO CREATE
Because Cameron wanted to convey the otherworldliness of the Na’vi culture and Pandora, composer James Horner tried to cultivate sounds that would sound unfamiliar to the average American moviegoer. He made use of ethnomusicologists, who would find unique sounds from cultures around the world to assist Horner in creating a truly original sound.
Speaking to the Ethnomusicology Review at UCLA, Dr. Wanda Bryant described the long process of sourcing audio samples for Horner’s perusal: "In some cases, the samples were from relatively well known cultures such as India or Sweden. But I also delved into field recordings and the repertoires of lesser known minority cultures. The stranger and more obscure sounds I found, the better. According to producer Jon Landau, “James was never about accepting the ordinary when the movie called for the extraordinary,” so it was a challenging assignment.
