New technologies in movies

Making of Avatar

"These are the agreements for the meeting: no audio recordings, no video shooting and no picture of the screen" - said Joe Letteri, Senior Visual Effects Supervisor of Avatar. He is the special guest of the XII edition of Future Film Festival of Bologna, a must in Italy for everyone who likes cinema and new technologies crossing


By MARCO RICIPUTI (marco.riciputi@wavemagazine.net)
from Ravenna, ITALY


The conference room was crowded - too busy on the floor, too - and many fans stayed out together with a slice of the accredited press. A scenario that gave the idea of the fever before the world premiere of the making of Avatar, the new James Cameron's movie that in just 41 days has 'sunk' Titanic, replacing it from the first place in the ranking of the highest grossing of all time.

- What James wanted to do - says Letteri - was to create a new kind of cinema removing all boundaries between real and fantastic.

And to do that Avatar, as well as a set of production, was an open tech-lab where they created new technologies to meet the needs of the director.

To note the development of a 'virtual camera' that allowed the director to see the avatars playing in real time: while the protagonist Sam Worthington walks slowly through an empty set with just two branches of fern, the director could see on the screen the avatar of Jack Sully around in the lush jungle of the planet Pandora. To this first shot in low resolution has been then added ever increasing details and the facial expressions, translated from the face of the actor to his corresponding digital avatar thank to a helmet with a camera that took over, literally, every blink of an eye.

The Letteri's team - an army of 900 people - has also won other challenges to make the fiction reality, using the 'spherical harmonics technique' to determine how the light hit the characters and objects while the system 'tissue' has revolutionized the study of the behavior of skin bones, muscles and tendons of the digital body. Making Avatar in 3D presented its own set of problems. The complexity of the environments made the creation of an entire computer graphics generated world very difficult to achieve. "We developed special software for rendering and compositing", says Letteri. "Without that we would have to render double the amount of data for a movie that was already exponentially more than any other computer graphic film to date". Just imagine that all the data of Avatar required 2,5 petabytes of disc space.

And some curiosity. Over a thousand plants - "a frightening job" says Letteri - form the Pandora's jungle while the 'floating mountains' are - we might say - Chinese, since it has been working on aerial photography done right there. Even the house of the Banshee, the flying mount of the people Na'vi, is on a mountain in China. Continuing the theme of Banshee, the scene where Jack Sully fights with one of them required three months of work. Finally, the blue luminescence of the Pandora's forest at night is inspired by the deep sea because Cameron is passionate about diving.


(Published: 09.02.2010.)