Madonna and Avatar : As incredible as it may seem, Madonna participated in the improvement of the technique of performance capture on Avatar!

From Pandora to Madonna, there is only one step! The Queen of Pop indirectly played a role in the design of Avatar in 2009!

When designing the universe of the planet Pandora, James Cameron and his team wondered about how to recreate human emotions on characters created entirely by computer, the Na’vi.

To do this, they have studied a lot of what has been done before in terms of performance capture, in particular on The Polar Express by Robert Zemeckis or The Lord of the Rings by Peter Jackson.

James Cameron and his producer, Jon Landau, then sought by all means to improve this technology, in particular to succeed in transcribing ultra realistic human facial expressions.

To succeed in their bet, that of capturing emotions in the most authentic way possible, the two men had the idea of analyzing Madonna’s expressions during her concerts.

WETA and ILM, the special effects companies that worked on Avatar, got to work, scrutinizing the interpreter of Like A Virgin in the smallest details during his shows, auscultating each of his mimicry and facial expressions.

Madonna and Avatar : MADONNA STAGE BEAST

“Madonna is impressive, she gives everything during her stage performances with crazy energy. So we had the idea of ​​using images of her face, recorded via a small camera placed near her microphone, to give them to our teams. visual effects.

Of course, we didn’t use his head as a model for the Na’vi, but our technicians studied his entire physiognomy, frame by frame, down to the pores of the skin, in order to optimize the rendering of the human expressions recreated by computer,” producer Jon Landau told The New York Times.

The queen of pop, known for giving grandiose and spectacular concerts, therefore indirectly allowed the captured performance to be improved and refined.

And if you want to realize the exceptional quality of the special effects of Avatar, the film was released in theaters in a remastered version on September 21st. As for the second opus, The Way of the Water, it will land on December 14, 2022 in dark rooms.

You can watch Avatar 1 on our VOD.