Way back before Avatar had even been release, James Cameron sat down with Popular Mechanics to talk about how he ended up inventing a completely new way of creating CG movies with his Stereoscopic-Virtual hybrid camera. He also explained how CG animation will never replace real actors because it is not the geeks behind the computers who are driving the performance, but rather the actors themselves through the motion capture technology. Taken from the Popular Mechanics article:
In fact, Cameron doesn’t even like the term “motion capture” for the process used on Avatar. He prefers to call it “performance capture.” This may seem like semantics, but to Cameron, the subtle facial expressions that define an actor’s performance had been lost for many of the digital characters that have come before. In those films, the process of motion capture served only as a starting point for animators, who would finish the job with digital brush strokes. “Gollum’s face was entirely animated by hand,” says Weta Digital effects master Joe Letteri. “King Kong was a third or so straight performance capture. It was never automatic.” This time, Cameron wanted to keep the embellishment by animators to a minimum and let the actors drive their own performances.
It’s probably this misconception that caused Avatar to loose out on best picture at the Oscars recently. Perhaps those at the Academy see CGI as a threat to future acting talent. James Cameron thinks otherwise.






