Although plot details on James Cameron’s four Avatar sequels are being kept tightly under wraps, we do know that the movies will explore the oceans of Pandora, with Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 in particular set to feature a number of underwater sequences.
Given that the Avatar movies rely heavily on performance capture, this change of environment has raised a number of technical challenges for Cameron and his crew, which the filmmaker has discussed in a recent interview with Collider.
“It’s never been done before and it’s very tricky because our motion capture system, like most motion capture systems, is what they call optical base, meaning that it uses markers that are photographed with hundreds of cameras,” said Cameron. “The problem with water is not the underwater part, but the interface between the air and the water, which forms a moving mirror. That moving mirror reflects all the dots and markers, and it creates a bunch of false markers. It’s a little bit like a fighter plane dumping a bunch of chaff to confuse the radar system of a missile. It creates thousands of false targets, so we’ve had to figure out how to get around that problem, which we did.”
“Basically, whenever you add water to any problem, it just gets ten times harder,” said Cameron. “So, we’ve thrown a lot of horsepower, innovation, imagination and new technology at the problem, and it’s taken us about a year and a half now to work out how we’re going to do it. We’ve done a tremendous amount of testing, and we did it successfully, for the first time, just last Tuesday [November 14th]. We actually played an entire scene underwater with our young cast. We’ve got six teenagers and one seven-year-old, and they’re all playing a scene underwater. We’ve been training them for six months now, with how to hold their breath, and they’re all up in the two to four minute range. They’re all perfectly capable of acting underwater, very calmly while holding their breath. We’re not doing any of this on scuba. And we’re getting really good data, beautiful character motion and great facial performance capture. We’ve basically cracked the code. Now, we’re still working in our small test tank. We graduate to our big tank in January.”
Avatar 2 will open on December 18th 2020, followed by Avatar 3 on December 17th 2021, Avatar 4 on December 20th 2024 and Avatar 5 on December 19th 2025. Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Matt Gerald, Stephen Lang, Giovanni Ribisi and Sigourney Weaver, while new additions to the cast include Kate Winslet, Oona Chaplin, Cliff Curtis, Britain Dalton, Filip Geljo, Jamie Flatters, Bailey Bass, Trinity Bliss, Jack Champion, and Duane Evans Jr.
Originally published November 26, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
