In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Avatar director James Cameron talked about what could be possible with his new motion-capture CGI technology. It's pretty juicy stuff. Take a look at this excerpt:
EW - From the beginning, you said your goal with Avatar was to figure
out a way to seamlessly translate an actor's performance into a
synthetic computer-generated character. Where did that come from?
Cameron - It evolved from a couple of things: growing up on a steady diet
of science fiction, imagining alien characters, and ultimately being
dissatisfied with what was possible with makeup and prosthetics, with an
actor having to be in the makeup chair for six hours a day. This technology
isn't about replacing or marginalizing actors. It's about allowing actors to
transform and empowering them to be as creative as they want to be.
And by the way, we did tall blue people with pointy ears here. But we could
easily have done a straight human look if we'd wanted to.
EW - Really? Motion capture has been great at creating creatures like
King Kong and Gollum but not as good at making convincing human faces.
Cameron - If we had put the same energy into creating a human as we put into
creating the Na'vi, it would have been 100% indistinguishable from reality. The
question is, why the hell would you do that? Why not just photograph the actor?
Well, let's say Clint Eastwood really wanted to do one last Dirty Harry movie,
looking the way he did in 1975. He could absolutely do it now. And that would be cool.
Seriously. If this is true, could this mean Star Wars episodes 7, 8 and 9 can be done with the original cast looking how they did in the early 80's? What about the return of the Joker for Batman 3? Whatever you think of Avatar as a movie, there is no denying what kind of impact this technology can have on the future of the movie industry.
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