James Cameron recently came out and said those Avatar sequels are definitely comingand his head is full of ideas for screenplays involving Pandora and its cast of wily blue characters. We all know that Cameron is a man whose vision is usually a step or two ahead of everyone else, even if his filmmaking career occasionally appears stagnant, and it doesn’t appear that he’ll be phoning it in when Avatar gets its myriad sequels. He won’t actually be creating a new planet for our avatars to live on, but he will once again be pushing technology forward in a slightly more realistic way.
Deadline reports that for this year’s National Association of Broadcasting Summit on Cinema in Las Vegas key note speaker and Avatar producer Jon Landau revealed Cameron will be adding an extra bit of realism for underwater scenes for the sequels, and that he “will do performance capture in water.” One has to assume that more technology is involved than just figuring out a sticky solution to keep those glowing balls stuck to the actor’s body suit, but man that’s gotta be a tough one, right? No?
“We want to take advantage of the technologies brilliant people are putting out to make the next two movies even more emotionally engaging and visually tantalizing,” Landau said, “and to really wrap up the story arc of our two main characters.” They want to do it “because we can stimulate it visually but can’t simulate it experientially for them.”
It sounds like something that will make a lot of movies more interesting in the future. Whether those films are Avatar sequels or not remains to be seen. Our best prediction is that someone is currently planning on suing Cameron for stealing their underwater mo-cap idea.
