“We could have done it with rubber applicated makeup, and it would have looked horrible, and it would have been boring and stupid. Blue actors would be running around a rainforest in their underwear with a bunch of blue body paint, and I wasn’t interested in that” says James Cameron, the director of the movie Avatar. The first thing all of the behind the scenes videos and articles stated was that Avatar is not an animated film, the actors did just about everything you saw. The film used CGI technology which stands for computer generated imagery which is special visual effects created using a computer software. The movie is 40% live action and 60% photo-realistic CGI. CGI makes a real-time moving skeleton of the actor, and because of that, the actors were able to drive a computer-generated character. James Cameron decided it was a good time to make Avatar after he watched Gollum in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Gollum was created using CGI.  However, the CGI took A LOT of time, the CGI scenes took an average of 46 hours to render, and that right there explains why the film took four years to complete.

Before the film took place, they put the actors in a big ball filled with cameras, using those cameras they made a 3D model of the actor's face and studied their face movements and facial expression to make their avatars. They also had to make the actors suits for the CGI to work. The actor's suits had markers all over them, so the CGI could track them. They also filmed many scenes in a large warehouse that was filled with a bunch of tracking cameras. One of the most interesting parts of the actors suits was their hats/helmets, they were made for each actor to fit their head perfectly, the hat was also rigged with a camera in front of their face that was there to capture all of their facial motions, leading to the genuine human emotion you can see in the film. The film also used a green screen for many scenes in the human world on Pandora and inside of the housing units.

People believed that the film was going to be harder for the actors due to the fact that they weren’t in their environment, the actors said that they just had to use their imagination. Sam Worthington said that “even though I was 9 feet tall and blue, the avatar was capturing my personality and my soul”.  There were actually many things that I didn’t notice when watching the film that I learned from watching behind the scenes, for example, the avatars have five fingers and eyebrows, whereas the Na’vi have no eyebrow and only four fingers. Speaking of the Na’vi, the Na’vi language sounded so real in the film because it is. It was made by a linguist named Dr. Paul R. Frommer, who was asked by James Cameron to make a language that can be easily pronounced by humans, but so different from every other language in the world. Frommer ended up making 1000 plus words in Na’vi. Another thing I found interesting was that most of the animal noises that were used in Avatar were actually recycled dinosaur sounds from Jurassic Park. Pre-production was huge in Avatar, James wanted to start the film in 1999 but it was going to be too expensive, so he had been working on the film for 10+ years before it was released.

Avatar is a movie I personally love, and one that no matter how many times you watch it it never seems to become boring. I believe doesn’t become boring due to the amount of work and attention to detail that the actors, film crew, and Jame Cameron put into the four-year film.