Making of Movie Avatar
Summary
Avatar was not an animated film. In animated films, actors record their performance, but do nothing else with the character. In Avatar, the actors did all the actions that people see on the film.
Performance capture is a technique where you try to capture the performance of an actor and translate it to a digital character. You put an actor in a suit with markers and then use a lot of cameras all around to record all the motions of the markers. The computers then create a real time moving skeleton of the character, and from that skeleton you can drive the character.
Tons of high-definition references from all these different angles are taken, so that all the subtle nuances of the faces could be captured.
Keywords: Avatar, James Cameron, performance capture, CGI, animation, special effects
