Avatar is a mix of live action/performance capture (CGI), no different than any Marvel/Planet of the Apes/Alita Battle Angel/DC/Star Wars movie. When I think of animated movies in 2022 (Pixar for example), they're 100% animation and the actors are vocals only, there is no physical performance capture.
The main differences that I see are in the fine details, up close shots of the Na'vi and the backgrounds on wide shots are much deeper and very clear. As for Alita type shots I think we'll see plenty of those whenever a Na'vi or human Avatar has to interact with humans on their turf and in their environment (see very short jungle sequence 50 seconds in). Also the Youtube clip is 1080p and probably compressed. The movie was shot in 4K. If anything the movie will be a visual feast for the eyes again. No worries here about it being too dark/muddy/veiled.
Eh, isn't performance capture used in this way just another kind of animation? I think Cameron just wants to use actors as temporary stand-ins and then use cameras to capture the performance, and then bend it to whatever he "sees" in his head. To me, it's a giant leap away from filmmaking, and not necessarily in a good way. I worked on Final Fantasy for a week or two back in 1999 and thought that was awful, too. I'm not saying Avatar 2 is bad: I'm saying it's a cartoon, no matter where the images came from. At least with the Planet of the Apes movies, the sets were real and the humans were real.
That is what I see it. I don't see this much different on an underlying basis then when Disney Aminators used rotoscoping to film actual movements as their basis to create lifelike motions of their animated characters. "Rotoscope animation describes the process of creating animated sequences by tracing over live-action footage frame by frame. Though it can be time consuming, rotoscoping allows animators to create lifelike characters who move just like people in the real world." Motion capture by computer is just a direct digital way to capture analog movement, in order to create the animated characters.
There will be plenty of live action with real humans on sets, check the cast list posted at the top of the thread. Worth checking out is the making of the 2009 Avatar. James Cameron twitter - The last set for 2020 filming —The Matador (a 50’ forward command boat) on a 16-ton, 360 degree motion-control base. Three Technocranes and a Russian Arm mounted on top of a Mercedes-Benz. Just another day on the set of the Avatar sequels.
Oh, god. This better not be another "Pacific Rim." Go, soldiers!! What's that actor's name? "Rock Gravel?"
I wonder how significant it is hiring well known actors to play the Navi? It is different for the hoomans in the movie and those who have Avatars. I didn't even realize that I was watching Kate Winslet in Insurgent and that was in 2014. I only realized who she was, when I was reading the credits.
I figure it's good promo, when they crank up the machine for press interviews, premieres it helps to have some big names attached to a project. Kate playing a Navi?? apparently she liked the challenge of filming underwater, the performance/motion capture element (1st time for her I think) I guess that appealed to her, it's something very different from her normal roles that's for sure. I thought she was great in Mayor of Easttown.
One secret that Cameron did not talk about much back in 2009 is, if you read the 2010 Making of Avatar book, they bury in the details that the rotoscope/motion capture wound up being too jerky and "unreal" (for lack of a better word). They wound up spend months and millions of dollars having human artists endlessly draw and redraw the characters to make them more fluid. The book is here if you want to check it out: The Making of Avatar by Jody Duncan Jesser & Lisa Fitzpatrick https://www.amazon.com/Making-Avatar-Jody-Duncan-Jesser/dp/0810997061 I was very surprised a decade ago when I read that, just to discover how much human intervention went on. I can also tell you that millions were spent fixing the 3D live-action footage shot, because the Pace-Cameron rig they built would get hot, the metal would expand, and it'd get out of alignment (in different directions) every day on the shot. This required endless, costly fixes in post at Lowry Digital. You could expect that, more than 10 years later, they've gotten a lot of the bugs out of this system. But my gut feeling is animation always has to be tweaked to give it a sense of life and personality.
So who is going to be in Avatar The Way of Water? Screenplay - James Cameron and Josh Friedman Music - Simon Franglen Humans Michelle Yeoh - Dr. Karina Mogue Giovanni Ribisi - Parker Selfridge Jermaine Clement - Dr. Ian Garvin Edie Falco - General Frances Ardmore Joel David Moore - Norm Spellman Brendan Cowell - Scoresby Jack Champion - Javier 'Spider' Socorro Na'vi Kate Winslet - Ronal Sam Worthington - Jake Sully Zoe Saldana - Neytiri Oona Chaplin - Varang Cliff Curtis - Tonowari CCH Pounder - Mo'at Chris Coleman - Young Lo'ak Bailey Bass - Tsireya Jamie Flatters - Neteyam Keston John - Va'ru Britain Dalton - Lo'ak Back from the dead/??? Sigourney Weaver - new character Stephen Lang - Miles Quaritch Matt Gerald - Corp. Lyle Wainfleet
I think that one thing that Cameron doesn't like to admit is that all the DC / Marvel / whatever movies that have come out in the last 20 years have already pushed the limits of visual effects beyond belief. The bar has been raised much higher than anybody had expected. My bet is the reasons for the delays has been he's seen the most recent films, and said, "sh!t, we better up our game on this thing." Fear of failure is a massive problem for creative artists, particularly when they're trying to top one of their own great works of the past. I'm thinking of Orson Welles, Brian Wilson, Michael Jackson, and others who did one great film or album, then spent the rest of their careers desperately trying to do something even better.
Years ago, I was given to understand that Lucas delayed his second trilogy so that special effects technologies would have improved?
No, the two reasons he delayed the trilogy were a) he was exhausted, and b) he was out of money (having lost $50 million to his first wife after their 1983 divorce). Lucas was determined to self-finance the prequels so that he could own the 100% and not be beholden to any studio, and that took him about 15 years to get that kind of cash together. It had nothing to do with VFX per se, but he knew that the longer he waited, the better the chance that digital VFX would allow him to use "bigger" virtual sets and spend less money on physical production (which it did).
I'm watching the trailers and it looks worse than the original as a story and doesn't look any different in CGI quality. What gives? It looks just as fake. What ever James Cameron thinks his "movie" is... it's a glorified video game -- the boring parts you skip over.
