Looking Outwards 09

For this week I’m analyzing  Sean Meng’s review of Avatar from week 5.

It’s been a while since this movie came out and I had nearly forgotten the sheer computational power involved in this movie. To create such realistic environments and personalities, animators had to work with a new system of motion-capture that revolutionized the industry.

What I think is worth mentioning that not only on the generated computer graphics front, there was a huge amount of processing power necessary for the film to exist. The film used a company called Weta Digital and rendered the movie, which consisted of processing 8 gigabytes of data per second running 24 hours for over a month. Often each of Avatar’s frames took several hours to render. And when you consider that is just one frame out of 24 for every second of film, you can imagine why the major processing power at Weta Digital was needed.