The new 'Avatar' of technology in movies

BANGALORE, INDIA: Starting last Friday suddenly, the world of cinema began talking about technology and movies. And the reason? No doubt the latest blockbuster from James Cameroon - Avatar. Introducing the 3D experience to a larger scale the movie is said to turn a new leaf in the history of movie making.

Remember, in an earlier story on the significance of technology behind the movie experience, Harry Potter and the software mystery we mentioned about the upcoming 3D experience and the new technology called stereoscopic 3D vision, which is catching up really fast in the market.

And now Avatar underscores that. According to reports, the movie uses performance capture technology, which creates computerized images from real human action. So every action is more real and palpable. The footage is built from around 70 per cent Computer Generated Imaginary (CGI), which means the cast had motion-capture suits that carried sensors. These sensors enabled the computers to register the movements of the body showing performance capture.

It is mentioned in a report that for Avatar, the makers of the movie had designed a different hi-def 3D camera system. It is around 50 pounds in weight and used a mix of two Sony HDC-F950 HD cameras at a distance of 2.5 inches in order to capture the stereoscopic separation of human eyes. In other words it has the two camera lenses that converge on a focal point with the help of a computer and helps in smooth camera moves and action sequences.

In an interview on the making of the movie, actors Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana said that the entire experience of working on a rich movie is different. The challenge was that since the recording was following a motion-capture technology that records a 360-degree view, the actors have more freedom and they need to stress on the character play than the camera.

A report said that the information from the cameras produced a digital framework, or rig, of an actor’s face. “The rig was then given a set of rules that applied the muscle movements of each actor’s face to that of the Avatar. To make a computer-generated character express the same emotion as a human actor, the rig had to translate every arch of a human eyebrow directly to the digital character’s face.”

With the new revolution in cinema viewing coming across, it is not very far that every viewer will be become an actor, participating in the real experience, rather than just listening and watching these stories unfold.