For him In the original “Avatar,” writer-director James Cameron made extensive use of cutting-edge motion capture technology. That allowed its human cast to play blue-skinned aliens called Na’vi, inhabitants of a jungle moon called Pandora.
With its long-awaited sequel, Cameron set out to explore more of Pandora. The script, which he wrote with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, it depicted many scenes in water and underwater with a semi-aquatic Na’vi clan, the Metkayina.
But there would be none of the usual Hollywood “dry as wet” motion capture techniques: actors dangling from wires, feigning weightlessness, doing swimming motions in midair. According to members of Cameron’s technical team, the director insisted on “wet as wet.”
“It’s about the credibility of the actor’s performance,” said Richie Baneham, visual effects supervisor for Cameron’s production company, Lightstorm Entertainment. “If an actor is really in the water, there is a viscous resistance. It influences the actor’s choices.”
“Avatar: El Camino del Agua” represents a milestone in visual effects technology: underwater motion capture.
A tank was built at the Lightstorm Entertainment facility in Manhattan Beach, California. It was almost 10 meters deep and contained around 340,000 liters of water, with windows in the pool walls so that cameramen could take their shots. The tank also simulated waves and currents.
To help hold their breath, the cast members trained with a freediving instructor. Kate Winslet holds the cast record for freediving: seven minutes and 14 seconds.
The main cast also share their scenes with professional underwater dancers and gymnasts.
Vast amounts of motion capture data were gathered in this way. For the next step, that data was shared with artists at Weta FX, the visual effects company that director Peter Jackson co-founded in Wellington, New Zealand.
Weta artists transformed artists in wetsuits into the Na’vi. They also created the lush digital environments, transporting the action from a tank to an enchanting underwater kingdom of flora and fauna.
According to Weta, 57 new species of sea creatures were created for the film. Weta also consulted with researchers at Victoria University in Wellington on the biology of coral reefs.
“Avatar: El Camino del Agua” is the largest visual effects project the company has ever undertaken. Only two shots in the film do not contain visual effects and almost all of the water is computer generated.
Weta’s team had to become adept not only at hydrodynamics, but also at rendering that complex physics photorealistically.
The team filmed hundreds of hours of reference images: wind waves on the surface of the water, waves hitting rocks and the movement of algae.
Weta pioneered ways to make things look wetter and recently filed a patent application for “methods for generating visual representations of a collision between an object and a fluid.” This innovation was especially useful in a scene in which a human character, named Spider, emerges over rocks alongside a group of Na’vi, dripping with water. The shots combine live action footage of actor Jack Champion, who was filmed in a wave pool, with digital Na’vi.
Eric Saindon, effects supervisor at Weta, said the simulated water on the Na’vi had to look just as convincing as the real water on the human character.
For that scene alone, it took Weta’s systems two weeks to simulate just the movement of water. That’s before the millions of processor hours required to render the graphic elements.
This painstaking work is not intended to draw attention to itself. “We just want people to watch the movie and get carried away, and forget we did anything,” Saindon said.
By: DARRYN KING
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6509178, IMPORTING DATE: 2022-12-27 21:50:07
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