Producer Jon Landau says filmmakers behind the upcoming sequels are currently exploring technologies to allow James Cameron to 'create performance capture underwater.'
- Apr 8, 2013
AceShowbiz - After successfully applying the groundbreaking visual effects on his ambitious mega-budgeted "Avatar" four years ago, James Cameron is going to push the envelope yet again. The director "will do performance capture in water" to challenge himself to give a better experience for audience.
"We want to take advantage of the technologies brilliant people are putting out to make the next two movies even more emotionally engaging and visually tantalizing, and to really wrap up the story arc of our two main characters," Jon Landau said at the 2013 NAB Technology Summit on Cinema.
"We have kept a team of digital artists on from Avatar in order to test how we can create performance capture underwater," the producer explained. "We could simulate water [in computer graphics], but we can't simulate the actor's experience, so we are going to capture performance in a tank."
"We are looking at [techniques including] what we did before with reflective markers," he went on, "[It includes] how we record reference photography so that as we are going through the editorial process and the post-production workflow, we can see what the actors did and make sure that the final performance up on screen represents that."
Cameron once said he would make "Avatar 2, Avatar 3, maybe Avatar 4." He said the second and third movies were "separate stories that have an overall arc inclusive of the first film," with the second having a clear conclusion instead of a cliffhanger to the third film. As for the fourth one, he planned to make it a prequel, set 35 years before the events of the first film, that deals with the early colonization of Pandora.
