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.”

This is how “meet cute” happens in James Cameron’s Avatar: At night in a jungle on the alien moon Pandora, Jake Sully, a cocky Marine played by Sam Worthington, stumbles into a pack of snapping, six-legged predators called viperwolves. This jarhead is about to become a viperpuppy chew toy when a lithe huntress named Neytiri (Star Trek’s Zoe Salanda) intervenes. Luckily for Jake, Neytiri is handy with a bow and arrow. She’s also smart, bilingual, spiritual, great with animals, and—for a 10-foot-tall cyan-colored woman with a tail—a babe.

READ MORE

The site also has a piece up that’s likely to inspire riots in geek circles, on the 12 Best and Worst Digital Characters. The usual suspects are there — Gollum (Best), Jar Jar (Worst). But how do they omit the grandaddy of them all: The T-1000? When I interviewed Peter Jackson for The Futurist, he described watching T2 as a young horror filmmaker in New Zealand, when he was a decade away from releasing the first Lord of the Rings movie. “My God, I had no idea a computer could even do this,” Jackson told me he felt at the time. “It was CGI, but it looked incredibly realistic. It was the genesis of the whole CGI movement.” Yes, the George Washington of CG characters should definitely be on the list.