Why, if effects-driven movies like Avatar are the lifeblood of Hollywood these days, are VFX shops struggling—so many laying people off, shutting down, scraping by with thin profit margins? That question nagged at me, so I tackled it for this TIME Magazine story called “Hollywood’s VFX Sweatshops.” I’ve heard from LOTS of VFXers since the piece came out, many relieved to have issues like outsourcing, change orders and the possibility of a VFX guild discussed out in the open.

A chunk of my book covers Cameron’s role in founding the effects company Digital Domain, with Scott Ross and Stan Winston, in 1993.  This is from a section of The Futurist about Cameron’s “Digital Manifesto,” a passionately argued 13-page document he wrote in 1992, laying out where he expected filmmaking to go in the coming years. Remember, it’s 1992—Bill Clinton just took over the White House, Jay Leno just took over The Tonight Show, T2 won the Oscar for visual effects and the VFX world is atwitter about something called morphing. Cameron, as usual, is looking ahead, describing a process almost identical to the one he would employ 13 years later to shoot Avatar:

In his manifesto, the director described something called “performance capture,” in which an actor would don a “data suit,” sending a stream of information about the actor’s physical movements to a workstation, where they would be inserted into a “synthetic environment.” Artists would then use software to turn the actor’s digitized performance into a fantastical character. “Jack Nicholson could create not just the voice but the total body performance of a
demon, while puppeteers nearby cause his tail to lash and his pointed ears to furl and twitch,” Cameron wrote. “The actor can truly ‘become’ his animated character.”