Oscar-winning producer Jon Landau revealed during his keynote at the NAB that the production of Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 will include underwater performance capture.
“We have kept a team of digital artists on from Avatar in order to test how we can create performance capture underwater,” he said. “We could simulate water [in computer graphics], but we can’t simulate the actor’s experience, so we are going to capture performance in a tank.”
He added that they “are looking at [techniques including] what we did before with reflective markers” and that an important task is “how we record reference photography so that as we are going through the editorial process and the postproduction workflow, we can see what the actors did and make sure that the final performance up on screen represents that.”
Landau said that the two films will “wrap up the story arc of our two main characters.”
Landau’s keynote is available via player below.
