Everyone is quoting producer Jon Landau following his recent comments at the NAB Technology Summit on Cinema (via THR) in which he addressed the continued production of Avatar 2 and specifically references to developing the ability to capture actor performances underwater.
We have kept a team of digital artists on from Avatar in order to test how we can create performance capture underwater. 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.
This, of course, is no real surprise. We expected as much as there was already talk of Avatar 2 focusing on Pandora’s oceans and when James Cameron went down to the Mariana Trench it had the appearance of more than just an expedition as it did a research trip for the Avatar sequels and Landau confirmed as much to Bleeding Cool earlier:
We have already made a commitment that the Avatar sequels will have underwater sequences, inspired as much by time Jim has spent scuba diving as his expedition to the Mariana Trench. And we’re working on a way to do performance capture underwater right now. We have some really good people working on that. We set the problems, bring in people and say “Attack it. Here’s what we want to do, and we believe you can do it” and then we just have to get them to believe they can do it too.
As for whether or not the sequels will be shot at a higher frame rate that decision doesn’t seem to have been made though Landau clearly isn’t closing the door saying, “We want to take advantage of the technology that people are putting out there to make the next two movies more engaging and visually tantalizing, and wrap up the story arc of our two main characters.
“It is a better experience for the audience,” he said of high frame rates. “Nobody should dictate to a filmmaker whether they should make films at 24, 48 or 60fps since the technology now exists and can be presented with the same cinema equipment.”
I am thankful, after all this technology talk, however, that Landau does add, “Let’s not lose sight of why people go to the movies. They don’t watch for technology they watch because they make an emotional connection to a story.”
As of now a release date for Avatar 2 is unclear and at this point I wouldn’t expect it any sooner than late 2015, though that could mean Avatar 2 in ’15 and Avatar 3 in 2016. We’ll see.
