Over at TheWrap they have an interview with Joe Letteri about the processes and technology involved in Avatar, and they get into the details of how they tracked the actor’s faces for animation with the Na’vi models, and how they merged the actual actors with the Na’vi models to create unique and recognizable faces.
But “Avatar” didn’t use dots glued on the actors’ faces.
No. For “Avatar,” we needed something that was quicker than all the markers on the face, so Jim came up with the idea of having a helmet-mounted video camera. But we needed a lot of software, then, to figure out what the face is doing, and how you translate that back to what the muscles are doing. And we applied that not just to one character, but to seven main characters with speaking parts, and other 14 secondary characters that also had some dialogue, and then another couple hundred for the tribe. They’re all singing and chanting, and we never knew where Jim was going to move the camera.
