Do you still remember the shock that "Avatar" brought to us ten years ago?
Ten years later, the original cast of James Cameron's "Avatar" presented the sci-fi action visual effects blockbuster "Alita: Battle Angel".
From "Titanic" to "Avatar", Cameron has been setting new box office highs. In fact, in addition to box office, Cameron has contributed and promoted global film history. Also very critical. Over the years, he has been constantly trying to break the technical and imaginative boundaries of film production, and "Alita" has taken the special effects technology of today's movies to a new level.
"Alita" is adapted from the comic "Guangmeng". The story takes place in the future in the 26th century. Doctor Ide (played by Christoph Waltz) picked up the head of a mechanical girl in the ruins of the city, took her home, and gave her a brand new body. Named Alita (Rosa Salazar). But Alita is no ordinary girl. She carries technology that has disappeared for three hundred years.
20 years ago, Cameron, who had just finished filming "Titanic", read "A Dream of Guns" in one sitting and became a fan of it quickly. He was determined to make this movie The comic was brought to the big screen.
However, the film special effects technology at the time could not fully display the science fiction elements in the comics, so Cameron had to write this down in a notebook.
I heard that one of Cameron’s purposes in filming “Avatar” ten years ago was to “test the technical waters” for “Alita”. Unexpectedly, He just tested the waters and produced an epic masterpiece of a science fiction film. Kashen is truly worthy of being the "technical emperor".
Cameron has high hopes for "Gunslinger" and wrote a 186-page script, more than 1,000 pages of insights and storyboards. In order to achieve the ultimate character picture, the special effects team used It has achieved the world's top "dynamic capture technology".
In order to maximize the visual effect of a real person's face, each of Alita's facial pores has been implanted with nearly 500,000 velvet hairs.
Especially the pair of oversized eyes, which can be called the ultimate restoration of the original work. You can clearly see the shape, lines and capillaries of the iris. It would be more intuitive to explain it with numbers. One of Alita's eyes is made of more than 8.3 million pixels, while the entire "Lord of the Rings" only used 150,000 pixels.
The role of Alita is played by real-person actress Rosa Salazar. The film’s special effects production team Weta Studio combines CG technology with "performance capture" this time. ” technology, comprehensively “scans” Alita’s facial expressions, rendering facial details more agile and full of energy.
Alita has also become the first human-like character in film history to achieve synchronization between CG and real-life scenes. It looks very similar to a real person, but at the same time it makes people feel that she is not a real person. This is really a magical experience.
In order to record all the subtlest facial expressions of the actor during the performance, the production team installed a pair of cameras on Rosa Salazar's head during filming , in order to capture the amplitude and depth of each expression.
Just the scene of Alita eating an orange took a year to shoot more than 2,000 versions. After continuous improvement, the scene that affected her when doing this action was The reactions of other parts of the body, such as the wrinkles on the forehead and the tightening of the body, appear extremely natural.
Such high requirements directly equal a massive amount of work. The disk space occupied by "Alita" is more than three times that of "Avatar". The special effects are produced by Thirty thousand computers and 800 technical personnel were used to create it, and the total rendering time was 432 million hours.
It can be said that these 432 million hours are condensed into a 125-minute movie.