DailyMail has an article up about Avatar, mockingly named ‘Dances with Smurfs’, and gets into the massive amount of work required to create the photorealistic CG characters which outnumber the real actors several-to-one. In particular, being a camera operator on set had to be a nightmare:
The project was conducted with Cameron’s customary mania for perfection, using close-up cameras so sensitive they could detect muscles moving under the skin of the actors’ faces.
Each shot was captured by up to eight cameras simultaneously and the images were then turned into aliens. The final effect is said to be so convincing that you could be looking at actors in make-up rather than digitally created beings.
And every scene had to be shot twice on 3D cameras to make the film work in three dimensions.
