Building the world of Avatar meant inventing effects like you've never seen before.
Image: Courtesy of 20th Century Fox
Inside the 3-D World of Avatar
James Cameron is striding across a vast soundstage in Playa Vista, an oceanside district of Los Angeles. This enormous, near-windowless building used to be part of Hughes Aircraft, turning out parts for fighter planes during World War II. Next door is the hangar where Howard Hughes built his “Spruce Goose,” the gargantuan flying boat that took so long to construct that the war was over before the craft made its one and only flight. Now it’s March 2008, 10 years almost to the day since the Titanic director took the stage at the Oscars, shook a gold statuette over his head, and notoriously declared himself you-know-what. Like Hughes, Cameron has been toiling away for years on an epic project some feared would never reach completion: a $250 million spectacle called Avatar.
Even by Hollywood standards, Avatar is moviemaking on a colossal scale. A sci-fi fantasy about a paraplegic ex-Marine who goes on a virtual quest to another planet, it merges performance-capture (a souped-up version of motion-capture) with live action shot in 3-D using cameras invented by Cameron. If all goes according to plan, on December 18 Avatar will dissolve the boundary between audience and screen, reality and illusion — and change the way we watch movies forever. “Every film Jim has made has soared past the envelope into areas nobody even imagined,” says Jim Gianopulos, cochair of Fox, the studio behind both Titanic and Avatar. “It’s not enough for him to tell a story that has never been told. He has to show it in a way that has never been seen.”
Today, Cameron and his crew are prepping the soundstage to record performance-capture data for a scene with the film’s two stars, Sam Worthington (last seen in Terminator Salvation) and Zoe Saldana (Uhura in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek). “Come on over here,” he calls out with a wave. “I’ll show you what this is.” Wearing worn jeans and a New Zealand Stunt Guild T-shirt, Cameron holds up a small flat-panel screen tricked out with multiple handles and knobs. This is his virtual camera, he explains, a custom-designed viewing system that enables him to see not what’s in front of him (a darkened soundstage) but the lush, computer-generated world that will appear in the film.
Several feet away, Worthington, who plays soldier-turned-humanoid-Avatar Jake Sully, and Saldana, his alien love interest Neytiri, are standing around in black bodysuits dotted with roughly 80 metallic spots. Infrared cameras are strung across the ceiling to track these reflective markers, capturing the movements of the actors’ bodies. These same cameras register markers on the frame of Cameron’s screen as the director moves it about.
Guide to Pandora: A Whole New World
James Cameron didn’t just imagine the planet Pandora, he created an immensely detailed alien world. It’s all cataloged in the 350-page Pandorapedia.
Mountain Banshee
Na’vi name: Ikran
Habitat: Mountainous regions of Pandora
Anatomy: Leathery, membranous wings stretched taut over bones made of biologically produced carbon-fiber composite
Size: Average wingspan of 13.9 meters
Feeding Ecology: Aerial predator, carnivore, pack hunter
Ethnozoology: The Na’vi can connect to a banshee through a neural interface that allows animal and rider to move effortlessly through the skies. The mountain banshee will bond with just one Na’vi in its lifetime.
Image: Courtesy of 20th Century Fox
What’s truly remarkable here is what appears on his display. Looking into it, Cameron doesn’t see Worthington and Saldana on a soundstage. Instead, he sees Sully and Neytiri, each 10 feet tall with blue skin, catlike features, and long tails. The background is not a bunch of gray plywood risers but the deep rain forest of the planet Pandora, where most of this movie takes place. Cameron can view in real time what other directors have to wait months to see.
But that’s not all he can do. The director calls up a scene recorded yesterday, and suddenly the image switches to a fan lizard, a Cameron-invented flying creature unique to Pandora. As the reptile comes to pixelated life, Cameron begins to gyre across the soundstage, tilting the screen. “I can zoom out a little bit. I can follow it around the landscape as he’s flying. Come underneath, come up on top if I want — see how it flies over the terrain.” It’s as if he were shooting with an actual camera — exactly the point. “I can’t operate a camera with a fucking mouse,” he says. “It’s ridiculous. It’s why CG camera movements look computer-generated.”
In the scene that Cameron is about to shoot, Sully and Neytiri are leaping through the jungle chasing fan lizards. The script calls for the two of them to stare in wonderment at the reptiles, represented on the set by some dots on the ends of a half-dozen skinny wooden poles that crew members are waving about. Setting aside his virtual camera, Cameron grabs a stick and — for the moment anyway — joins the fun.
