By Julie Sayo

If you haven’t seen James Cameron’s epic film Avatar, I suggest you see it now after all it is the highest grossing film in the country. Avatar won Best Film drama and Cameron won Best Director at the Academy Awards this past week. Cameron had originally planned on shooting the film in 1996 but scrapped the project after realizing that the technology of the time could not produce the film he envisioned. Fast forward to 2005 when Cameron and his crew at Weta Digital, the studio that produced special effects for King Kong and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, began the monumental project.

I won’t spoil the movie for you but I’ll talk about Avatars production technology. Perhaps part of the appeal of Avatar is its ability to completely immerse its audience in a world completely different from our own. This is not a film with the CGI of yesteryears, the graphics are visually stunning, so much so that would think Pandora and its people were real. The technology used to film the characters in the film is known as Facial Action Coding System or FACS which was developed by Paul Eckman and Wallace Friesen. FACS creates a map of muscle movement which is converted to motion data. This allowed for the Na’vi characters to have realistic facial and muscle movements. The characters in the film were actual people acting in a studio in black body suits from head to toe. These suits were fitted with motion points that were saved in a system and reinterpreted with the human’s “digital” characters.  Not only were the characters in Avatar  a  technological feat, the environment that Cameron created was a bioluminescent wonder. No detail is spared in Cameron’s sci-fi world.