chapter 05 . milestone : Avatar

1. Virtual presence breakthrough

Virtual presence may well be the crowning achievement of James Cameron's film.

mocap

Avatar is the first film with an ensemble of virtual creatures who maintain a real presence on screen that almost matches the presence of actors.

Although this presence is by definition mysterious, it owes less to the amazing work done on the eyes than to the sophisticated quality of the mocap (motion capture), which maps the waves of the actor's facial muscles to the animated being's head by recording and interpreting a mesh of green dots.

While credit must be given to the pioneering motion capture work of Robert Zemekis, to ILM's Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribean, and to the extraordinary but solitary Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, there's something about the presence of the Avatars that goes beyond the earlier pioneering efforts. A line has been crossed: Avatar let's us encounter the presence of virtual beings on screen, and empathize with them for the duration of a film

from the inside out

In Anne Thompson's great interview for Popular Mechanics, Cameron refers to performance capture, explaining that he sought ways to have the actors, not the animators, define the virtual faces. He emphasizes two key innovations:

- the actors wore a tiny camera strapped to their head to get the large amount of facial data necessary

-- camera operators with reference cameras freely captured the movement in the scene, sometimes very close to the actors.

Cameron admits that the first captures of Avatar's hero were "horrible, it was dead... It wasn't Sam". The director explains that successful performance capture must work from the "inside out": VFX Supervisor Joe Letteri and his team at Weta Digital in New Zealand, had to fine tune hundreds of "sliders" in the character "rig" that models and combines the data streams of facial movements.

In another timely interview by Anne Thompson on AnneCam, Joe Letteri explains the software decoding of facial mocap by saying "we try to derive which groups of muscles are activated, frame by frame, and in what proportion... and we sort of modify that to apply it to the Na'vi".

The virtual beings on screen are thus truly inhabited by the ghosts of the actors' gestures, just as the avatars in the story are possessed by the souls of the humans sleeping in their hi-tech coffins.

the future

Virtual beings with presence will revolutionize movies by infusing them with bewildering, hybrid fusions of actors and virtual beings.

In the immediate future, Avatar's seminal breakthrough in performance capture will be limited to high budget action films like the upcoming Tintin trilogy by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, also made with the team at Weta Digital.

In an interview with Le Monde, Jackson explains the choice of CG and mocap for Herge's comic book hero as the way to recreate the drawings on screen: "Steven and I understood immediately that our Tintin had to absolutely resemble Herge's, otherwise it wasn't worth it... we understood that by doing it in animation with motion capture, we could obtain a drawing that really looks like Herge's."

Musing about the future possibilities of virtual presences, why not imagine CG animation that would push cartoons into "motion portraits" of actors that have the fidelity, freedom and presence of paintings.

Looking ahead we can imagine a thousand new shades of cinematic characters, blending from real actors to totally virtual beings with just enough of a grin or a gait to convey an authentic presence.

Virtual beings with true presence usher in a new, truly revolutionary era of cinema

2. A world of wonder for Gen Z

Cinema in its essence is a place of pure wonder. Avatar succeeds in creating a vast, imaginary world full of beautiful flora and fauna that constantly surprise, delight and fascinate. It will join Lawrence of Arabia, 2001, Apocalypse Now, and Star Wars in marking a generation of young movie-goers with a defining experience of what cinema can be.

Avatar keeps cinema alive.

I found the world of the Na'vi was most dazzling at night, when the luminescent forest evokes the underwater landscapes that Cameron is so imbued with.

Much of the power of Avatar comes from the repeated contrast of parallel worlds, and the film does a wonderful job of intertwining, and finally switching, the waking and dream realities, a dizzying reversal that The Matrix only hinted at.

Of course, this shift between reality and reverie also represents the cinematic experience itself, and the moviegoer might feel at times like the Marine hero as he snaps back from Pandora into his seat in the theater.

3. 3D revenues drive digital projection

For my part I was impressed by the subtlety of the stereoscopic vision afforded by my active polarizing glasses at the MK2 theater in Paris.

Avatar's 3D seemed much tamer, less ostentatious than, say, Ice Age 3 (which is a thoroughly enjoyable cartoon). Most of the depth in Avatar was behind the screen, except for a few remarkable moments, as when dozens of small glowing embers floated inside the big theater. It is a credit to Vince Pace's brand of 3D technology that it isn't in your face, either litteraly or figuratively.

Perhaps because of its subtlety, the 3D in Avatar felt less cut-out than most 3D fare, which often looks like a succession of overlapping planes, rather than the continuum I experienced in Avatar.

My Parisian ticket counter had a sign saying that they were charging 3 Euros, or 30% more because the film was 3D.

That, of course is the reason we will see an avalanche of 3D films released in Avatar's wake. Many theaters may install digital projectors just to get the extra 3D revenues. So the digital projection revolution may well be driven by 3D, and Avatar.