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It’s the job of the "Avatar" filmmakers to make us believe Pandora exists when we watch James Cameron’s films, but wow, is it a grueling process to do so! CinemaBlend just got the chance to go to Lightstorm Entertainment in Manhattan Beach, California earlier this week to learn how those blue aliens get made thanks to the art of performance capture, and we got schooled by "Fire And Ash" producer Rae Sanchini.

While we were there, we witnessed a live camera demo with VFX supervisor Richard Baneham on the same stage where the likes of Zoë Saldana, Kate Winslet and Sigourney Weaver did their performances with dots on their faces during the production of "Fire And Ash." We also sat down with Sanchini, and here’s what the producer had to say about performance capture.
Transcript
00:00This film we think is really the most emotional of the Avatar films to date and that wouldn't be possible
00:06without these incredible performances that we capture and translate with 100% fidelity into their CG characters, which we don't
00:15think is well understood by the general public or even within the industry.
00:19We made a real effort this time around to invite people into our process and to put out materials that
00:28showed how the side-by-sides of our actors' performance and then the finished rendered CG character in that same
00:37moment to try to get that message out.
00:39I think that's what amazes me the most is just the incredible performances we get by Una, Slang, Zoe, Sam,
00:50Kate Winslet, Cliff Curtis, and how that is just preserved with such great fidelity all the way through our very
01:01long production pipeline.
01:02I think they really enjoy the process. I know they really enjoy the process because it is so pure. It's
01:09really just these actors together using their imagination to put them in this faraway, distant place.
01:18They can see kind of a low-res version of the environment they're in just to hold in their mind
01:25and sort of extrapolate from there. But I mean, it's really extraordinary what they do without many of the trappings.
01:33The good news is our process sort of separates the performance aspect from the camera aspect, so they don't have
01:44to deal with, you know, oh, now we're going to do your close-up. Now we're going to do a
01:49two-shot. Now we've got to, you know, you've got to be on this mark. We've got, oh, the dolly
01:53move is here.
01:54They don't have to worry about any of that. They're just working with each other and with Jim directing the
02:00performance. And then when they're off, when they're gone, after we're finished with our performance capture process, we load up
02:09the, we call them camera loads, with the selected performances that Jim has chosen.
02:15And we play them back in that volume. And that's when Jim does his close-ups, his two shots, his
02:22coverage. So they're far, far away and don't have to worry about any of that, you know, hitting a mark
02:28or being in somebody's, you know, way for a shot. And Jim just focuses on cameras.
02:35And that's why he enjoys this process so much because he just has this time with the actors when he
02:41can just focus on them.
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