In 17 days, the movie Avatar has already made $1 billion at the box office making it the 4th biggest film of all time, and I would suspect it will go on to become the biggest film of all time.
Good job too, because Avatar cost approximately $280 – $310 million to produce (plus $150 million for marketing) – an unreal sum of money. But when you look into some of the tech behind Avatar you can start to see why it cost so much.
The cameras used to film the production in 3-D were developed specifically for the film by Cameron and his team. Not only could they give depth perception like no other film camera ever, the motion capture technology used augmented reality to map the actors’ performances in real-time to their CGI character. So Cameron could see the performances as if they were being performed in the computer generated world he had created.
60% of Avatar is said to be CGI. Most of the motion capture filming was done in a performance-capture stage called ‘the Volume’, specifically built for Avatar and over 6 times bigger than anything previously used. It housed 120 cameras that recorded all the action at once so Cameron could render whatever angles he wanted from the action and produce insanely accurate 3-D visuals.
Another 1st developed by Cameron for the film were the skull rigs used by the cast. It would point a tiny camera at the actor’s face, tracking 95% of the movement in their expressions and eyes meaning the actor’s performance is truly represented in the final film.
1 petabyte of storage is required to store the final render of the film which is the equivalent of 1,000 1TB hard drives. 40,000 processors and 104 terabytes of RAM were required to film, edit and render the film.
(More techy jargon can be found on the Next Web site, Popular Mechanics and Wikipedia).