Avatar Exclusive: How the Hell Did They Do That? Cameron’s Oscar-Winning VFX Master Tells All (Part 1)

Avatar Exclusive: How the Hell Did They Do That?
Cameron’s Oscar-Winning VFX Master Tells All (Part 1)

Share on Facebook posted 12-28-09 by John Freeman Gill

Visual effects technology has come a long way since effects virtuso John Bruno teamed up with James Cameron to codirect 1996′s Terminator 2: 3-D, a Universal Studios amusement park film. Back then, the 3-D camera weighed 450 pounds and was as large as a washing machine. “There’s no future in 3-D if this is how it’s gonna work,” Cameron proclaimed darkly at the time. “I don’t want to do this if we can’t move the camera.”

A decade and a half on, Cameron has belied his own gloomy prediction with Avatar, a tour de force which makes eye-popping use of today’s far lighter and nimbler 3-D cameras. Meanwhile, Bruno, Cameron’s sometime motorcycle buddy and longtime collaborator (Bruno snagged an Oscar for The Abyss) served as a VFX supervisor on the sci-fi epic.

In our exclusive multi-part interview, Bruno tells 30 Ninjas Editor John Freeman Gill how the film’s visual effects team used groundbreaking techniques to bring the native Na’vi, the avatars, and the distant moon Pandora to vivid life.

It Takes a Year To Make Neytiri Say, “I See You”

30 NINJAS: You were brought in by Fox and James Cameron to work with the New Zealand viusal effects house Weta midway through the production of Avatar. What are some of the sequences you worked on?

JOHN BRUNO: I did all the training scenes: Neytiri training Jake to shoot a bow and to track and kill the hexapeed in the rain. I did the sequence when Jake meets Colonel Quaritch in the amp-suit bay, and Quaritch climbs in the amp suit and makes the deal that Jake will work for him, and walks away in the amp suit. I did all the stage planning and shoot for the [climactic] Quaritch fight itself at the end of the movie, when Quaritch has leaped out of the burning Dragon [aircraft] and goes after Jake and then Quaritch fights Neytiri, who’s riding the Thanator. And then the scene that I started with on the film was the scene right after that where she saves Jake, puts the face mask on him, picks him up, holds him, and says, “I see you.” That took a year. [Laughs]

Motion-Capture Technology and the CBB Shots (Which Means “Could Be Better”)

30 NINJAS: The motion-capture technology on Avatar is pretty eye-popping. What was your involvement with it, and how did that system work?

JB: I started working with Jim Cameron, and [Weta's] Stephen Rosenbaum and Richie Baneham here in Playa del Rey on the motion-capture stage, where Jim was still shooting some capture. The motion-capture system was basically people wearing suits with little reflective patches on it, but they had done something different here that I’d never seen, which is that a real-time facial capture system was developed. What you were seeing—what the actors were doing—was instantly being interpolated and matched to an avatar or a character and played back [on monitors] in real time. It was still pretty rough—it was sort of a live action template. It was accurate enough to get the motion if a character picked up a bow or, I’ll just say, a cup. Not detailed enough that the hand would clasp around it, but it would be in the right position.

30 NINJAS: Now this means that when the actor on the stage picks up a bow, you are seeing a digital version of the character, of the avatar, say, on a screen in real time perform those actions?

JB: Exactly. And they’re in the [CGI] background that they are supposed to be in. They’re acting on an empty stage, but what you’re seeing on the monitors around you and what Jim’s seeing on his virtual system is the composited real-time image. [Using the perfromance] on stage, the lab guys would basically composite, record, and clean up and play [it] back pretty quickly. To the point where they would feed it to the editor on stage—one of the editors would be there at all times—to see if they had images that were displaying the action that Jim wanted. Now what was interesting about this was that once it’s locked in in this 3-D space, you can then go back and it’s basically a master action. It’s recorded and you can treat it like a master [shot] and then, for the use of this virtual camera system, walk through the [stage], walk through the action, and stand behind a character and move your camera to the point where you can get a nice composition where you’re over one character’s shoulder shooting at Neytiri, say, and Neytiri is acting. You record that, and then you can go back, shoot another angle over Neytiri’s shoulder onto Jake, as many times as you need. And you can play with the angle and find it. You know, if there’s a tree behind a character’s head and you don’t want it there [in the frame] you just step to the left and the tree is gone. But [the whole time] Jim is standing in the middle of nothing out on the stage. It’s quite bizarre.

30 NINJAS: Is he seeing that environment in his viewfinder as he’s looking through the camera?

JB: Well, the camera at this point is like an eight-by-ten monitor. There’s other 50-inch monitors in different postions around the stage that show what he’s seeing. So we’re all able to view that, and what he does is call action and push a button and [the equipment] records the moment that he wants, then he calls cut, and that action is then given to an editor, the editor cuts it together, and at the end of the day they can review it and say, “You know, I could do better on this angle,” or, “I need a shot here. I want to do a crane shot,” and there’s a way on that virtual camera system to do a crane shot or a helicopter shot. The whole process was quite bizarre to see.

They would then take that raw information, the lab would update it, polish it a little bit, —you could move trees, you could move rocks, you could move bushes, you could move characters around—and then sort of lock it in on what you wanted it to be. That information would then be sent to Weta, where they would … do a higher render of character animation and some better backgrounds. That would come back, and Jim could then study that, and he could reshoot that environment based on this sort of clean, much better filled out scene. And once that was done and locked in, that was approved for animation. And these turnovers would be done via cinesync sessions, where you get in a room where [you’re in L.A. and] you talk to the people you’re working with in New Zealand and you can draw on the screen and say, I want this to look like this, and this should be over there. So I can say that in October 2008 there were, I think, two shots or three shots that were finaled, but Jim called them a CBB, which means “Could Be Better,” and if there’s time you could go back and redo them. And those scenes were: The first shot of Neytiri in the tree, the first time you see her and she draws back her bow and there’s a close-up of her face, and the first shot of Jake, when he’s got his wooden branch that he carved into a makeshift spear.

30 NINJAS: And both those shots were done with this whole real-time motion capture system and the rest of the process that you just described?

JB: All of it. But the final process of making the final realistic look from Weta took months and months and months. Those were the first shots that finally made it, and that was in the first week of October ’08. Anyway, that’s the jungle look, and so I was assigned to WETA. I was basically sitting with Stephen Rosenbaum this whole time and he kept showing me how the WETA process works. They were still developing the skin textures of the the [pterodactyl-like flying creatures called] banshees; he was showing me all the 270 or 280 layers of jungle plants, trees, and ferns and the alien plants that Jim [Cameron] liked. He said, “If you want to get a shot that Jim might approve, he likes these specific plants, and you might be able to put some of them in later.” So I was learning this process, so at that point I was given the scene where Neytiri picks up Jake at the end of the movie and he’s unconscious and she puts a mask on him and brings him back to life and then holds him and a tear runs down her face, and she says, “I see you.” That scene took a year to finish. [Laughs] And the other scene that took a year was Jake getting his banshee.

Check out the rest of our interview with VFX master John Bruno below:

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