Avatar / Madonna: How did the star contribute to the success of James Cameron’s film?

Just one step from Pandora to Madonna! The Queen of Pop indirectly played a role in designing the avatar in 2009!

While creating the world of the planet Pandora, James Cameron and his team wondered how to recreate human emotions on the fully computer-generated characters, the Na’vi.

To do this, they studied a lot of things that had been done before in terms of execution, in particular, on Robert Zemeckis’s Polar Express or Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings.

James Cameron and his producer, John Landau, then tried their best to improve this technology, in particular, to succeed in copying ultra-realistic human facial expressions.

To succeed in their bet, to capture emotions in the most authentic way possible, two men came up with the idea to analyze Madonna’s expressions during her concerts.

WETA and ILM, the special effects companies that worked on Avatar, went to work and auditioned the artist. Like the Virgin Mary During his broadcasts, he listened to every facial expression and facial expression in the smallest detail.

Madonna’s performance

“Madonna is impressive, she gives everything with crazy energy during stage performances. So we had the idea to use the images of his face recorded by a small camera placed near his microphone to feed them to our teams. visual effects.

Of course, we didn’t use his head as a boat model, but our technicians studied his entire physiognomy, frame by frame, down to the pores of his skin, to optimize it to recreate human expressions. by computer”said producer John Landau in the columns New York Times.

The Queen of Pop, known for her grandiose and spectacular concerts, therefore implicitly allowed the filmed performance to be improved and refined.

And if you want to appreciate the exceptional quality of Avatar’s special effects, the film was released in theaters in a remastered version on September 21. As for the second opus, The Way of the Water, it will hit the darkrooms on December 14, 2022.