Avatar and cineSync

Thursday, 07 January 2010

To create the immersive 3D world of Pandora in James Cameron's new blockbuster Avatar, New Zealand's Weta spent many months working back and forward with Cameron, using cineSync to visually communicate.

From a 30ninjas interview with VFX supervisor John Bruno:

"(The raw) 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 finalled, 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."

To read the rest of the article, you can check it out here.