'Avatar', VFX Artist, Stephen Rosenbaum

0:09Jawad MirWelcome back, everyone, to another episode of Kingdom of Dreams Podcast, The Making of Stories. Once again, I've got Steven Rosenbaum, this time, for James Cameron's Avatar. He was a VFX artist on that amazing breakthrough technology film. I've had him already four times. Well, technically it was twice, and that was broken into four episodes, Jurassic Park, The Abyss, Terminator 2, and Forrest Gump, and now the Avatar. Not the Avatar. Again, I just love listening to details and behind-the-scenes stories of any film, especially from the VFX standpoint. Steven really brings some cool stories to the table, and I just love listening to him and sharing all this knowledge and wonderful be… behind-the-scenes stories. Without further ado, here is my conversation with VFX artist Steven Rosenbaum for James Cameron's Avatar. Welcome back, man. Appreciate again, to talk about James Cameron's Avatar. I mean, it's just one of those films that I remember when it came out. It's the only film that I've ever seen with 3D glasses.

1:11Jawad MirI have never seen anything af… after that with 3D glasses. And to see a James Cameron film after 12 years of Titanic, and to see it in such a totally different experience. Like, you know, motion picture, motion capture technology was kind of there, but he just took it to another level and introduced the world to something brand new. Just your experience from learning about the project, even though you had worked with James before initially and kind of your journey through it. Would love to start with whatever you want to start with. Would that would…

1:42Stephen RosenbaumYeah. I mean, it's, you know, that movie, Avatar, was, I think, a paradigm shift in our industry. W… was really, you know, all the stuff we had done up to that point, you know, there was cool, a lot of cool movies coming out, Jurassic, and of course Gump, what we did, and, you know, the advent of mocap and, you know, what we could do with capturing actors' performances and, you know, translating them onto characters or even creatures and so forth. But it was, it was really, Jim who brought, who came in with this idea that where he was, he, you know, his principal mandate was, why can't, why do I have to wait till post to direct my actors' performances? That was sort of the fundamental question he was asking was, you know, we have, you know, traditional s… prep, and then we shoot the movie and, you know, you might have an actor playing a character that is embellished with computer graphics or maybe is an entirely CG character that you don't see in post, you know, six months down into the post-production schedule because you've got to build it and you've got to do all your testing and so forth.

2:54Stephen RosenbaumWhy can't he just shoot his movie and direct his characters in real time like he does a live action shot… set, a live action shoot? And so, you know, we, weee, you know, had developed all these technologies is really there's disparate technologies that he, we started to look at and go, "Well, we could use mocap for this. We could use facial cap," but we have some limitations, and we'll talk about that. And, you know, we have the ability to do, we have these super fast computers now that we can do real time s… solving, on positional information and, you know, we could, you know, ma… probably put these things together. And on top of that, what happens when we get into a live action set and we want those characters to be embedded within this live action set? How do we do that? And so we, you know, we developed a concept called Simulcam, which was really, you know, a variant of motion capturing, a live action camera and doing a video mix, real stream, real time, stream mix, which we had done in the past, but nobody had really thought about how to, like, combine all these, you know, like I say, these disparate technologies and, you know, to try and achieve Jim's, Jim's goal.

4:11Stephen RosenbaumSo that was the premise. And, you know, I think through probably about a year's worth of development, we put it together. It was largely led by a guy named Glenn Derry, who's, who, you know, was really kind of the primary architect in a lot of the motion capture technologies that we used, who ultimately we called it performance capture, which was essentially what it w… what it sounds like, which is, you know, capturing an actor's, actor's performance, Jim directing not just the actor, but also the character. The actors can see the characters. Excuse me. The actors can see their own characters that they're playing and become them, which was sort of a key point that I think even to this day, you know, you ask most SAG actors that, you know, they're, they're afraid of this technology. But you look at like the Andy Serkis' out there and, you know, that they completely get it. They em… embrace it. They understand that character, that creature that I'm playing is actually my performance.

5:15Stephen RosenbaumAnd it's be… it's my performance because I can see it in real time. I can understand, you know, how to make that character perform the way I want it to do, not wait, you know, as I said, six months into post for an army of, you know, 50 animators to interpret what the actor wanted. So anyway.

5:35Jawad MirInteresting. That, I've never thought of that way, but go on.

5:38Stephen RosenbaumYeah. So I mean, I would say if you want, I can talk about, you know, the beginnings of the process, which were, you know, building a motion capture stage. At that point, you know, we were able to do what we called real time body capture. So you're, you know, you're putting, everybody's seen, you know, actors in these spandex suits, and they put these reflective markers on it. There's, there are different types of motion capture, but we used what was called optical, sensing. Basically, they're little reflective, like the same reflective material you get on the back of your tennis shoe or whatever. And there are, there's an array of cameras out there that are looking at these markers, and they're triangulating on each marker on an actor's suit. And in real time, they're doing a super fast calculation, what we call a solve, of that position in space. So if I have a marker on my shoulder and there's two or three cameras that can see the marker on my shoulder, at any given moment, it can kn… it knows spatially where I, where I am in this room.

6:45Stephen RosenbaumSo then you expand that out to a whole, cluster of these markers across a body and, you know, the compute power was such that we could do it super fast calculations, these solves, to the point where we were in real time at sub-millimeter precision. So it was incredibly accurate. So that was where we were at the beginning of the show. It was, we were, we were kind of just achieving that level of, technology. And, but we hadn't... What we hadn't done is, the ability to ca… to capture the face well. Up to that point, the only kind of facial capture we could do was, you may have seen, you know, we put tiny little markers on the face.

7:36Jawad MirYeah

7:36Stephen Rosenbaum... And they were glued on, sometimes upwards of, like, 300 little tiny little mar… mounted markers. And you had the av… have the actor hold relatively still, usually sitting in a chair or standing, and they couldn't really move around this room. They were in a small little box essentially, and the cameras were all pointing, you know, dozens of cameras, and they were capturing the facial movement. But it, even that was not that accurate. It was, it was not really, it was not only was it not flexible, but it wasn't, it didn't have the, robust, data production that we needed. It really was, it could give you sort of squishy per… facial performance. And what we were looking for was s… very tight, articulate, facial expressions. So, again, it was, I think, Glenn Derry who came up with the idea, well, why do we restrict... This was a mandate again from Jim. He wants his actor to be able to move around this entire space freely and not have to be in the confines, and why can't we capture the facial performance as well as the body performance together?

8:46Stephen RosenbaumSo he created a, you may have seen these. It's, it's, it's just basically like a bike helmet…

8:52Jawad MirYeah

8:52Stephen Rosenbaum... With a little camera that sticks off the side, and it points straight at their face.

8:56Jawad MirYeah.

8:57Stephen RosenbaumOn Avatar, we had a single camera. Subsequent shows, we've done multiple cameras and, you know, there's, there's still ongoing debate about what the bes… best configuration is. Is it, you know, two here, one here? Maybe there's two on top of each other here. What captures the face the best? The nice thing about the frontal camera was, and we can talk about this, later, but a… and I think it's missing in a lot of, CG-generated facial performances, is that it, this will allow you to see what's going on with the tongue. And perform… when you're here, you don't really see what's going on with the tongue. And when you see facial performances, and you're looking at it going, "Why is it just not quite right?" It's usually that you're lacking tongue articulation. So you're not… I mean, you might see, you know, my tongue very subtly, but what it does is it pushes, it pushes my lips and my cheeks into a certain position every…

9:54Jawad MirRight

9:54Stephen Rosenbaum... With every phoneme, every word. And so that camera looking straight in was allowing me to see, you know, how the tongue was banging against the teeth and the lips and so forth. So that really helped in terms of, like, the amount of data that we were ke… acquiring. So from that we were, we got very scientific. We started studying, you know, the people who had published out there, scientists that have published in various m… medical journals. And we came across one, a psychologist, named Paul Ekman, who sort of wrote a lot of books on this study of, facial expression, specifically microexpression, and, you know, the subtleties that go on with that. And, he had essentially codified human expression. He had broken it down into, the humans into seven universal human expressions.

10:57Stephen RosenbaumSo it's, you know, fear, surprise, anger, disgust, sadness, contempt, and I'm blanking on the other one. But…

11:06Jawad MirAnxiety.

11:07Stephen RosenbaumActually, anxiety is not an expression. It's a, it's a feeling.

11:11Jawad MirI know, I know. Yeah.

11:12Stephen RosenbaumYeah. But that's, that's actually what we were trying to, we were trying to determine, you know, what are, what are the expressions? 'Cause ultimately what we're trying to do is capture the persona of the individual, through those expressions. So anyway, we then started mapping the, you know, understanding the anatomy of the human face. And, you know, you've got your zygomatic major, your zygomatic minor. You've got your, you know, your eyebrows, your corrugators, and so forth. Your, you've got, you know, basically a l… l… l… if I recall, 11 muscles in the face that are, or primary muscles that are in the face that are making, you know, pulling and pushing to make expressions in your... And, so we s… we started to map the m… markers that we were putting on the face, and then we were, we decided to do it as makeup dots, essentially, these little green makeup dots, and we would mark them down the lines of the muscle. So as I smiled, you know, we could see how the ma… dots moved from a neutral pose to an expression.

12:19Stephen RosenbaumWe With those dots as they moved around on the face, we could essentially, record from the video camera that was placed in front of them, how they moved and then s… e… effectively, do a solve, of that human face ex… of the human expressions, and map that onto a character. So we s… we would start by doing a series of exercises with each actor and put them through the, essentially the extremes of their, how they move their face. So you know, you know, the simple way of saying it is, like, I smile differently than you or the way you smile. And, you know, you have certain facial ticks than I might have certain facial ticks. And, how much do I blink, how much do I move my head, and so forth. So, we were essentially capturing a library of that individual persona, and then, from the actual performance that we would capture of them, we could then translate that, essentially a map of that, onto their CG character.

13:30Stephen RosenbaumSo their Na'vi or their avatar, in this case. So, when we were first capping, we were not able to do the, just to be clear, we were not able to do a real-time solve of the face. We were doing a real-time solve of the body, so we were capturing video of the face, concurrent to the body capture. So you could have, you know, an avatar, a Na'vi, moving around the mo-cap studio, mo-cap stage, and they could be interacting with each other, and you'd see them on a monitor, you know, their CG equivalent. And the actors could also see that. So they'd be moving around doing, you know, all their performances, but n… n… their face would be static. Eventually a… as we got better at figuring out how to solve the face, we would, started to do some real-time facial solves. So, we did that to a more limited extent though on the show. But it was enough where, you know, if anybody's familiar with the process of shooting, you know, a live action movie, you know, you set up for a scene and the actors, you know, have their dialogue and they perform, and then they cut the camera and then they go over to a monitor and they review their take with the director.

14:43Stephen RosenbaumOr the director comes out and says, "Okay, that was really good, but I want you to adjust here." They could, just like that, but they could see not only their p… performance as a human, but they could see their character performance as well. So they could go, okay. So, like Zoe Saldana, she was great 'cause she could see, you know, it's much... I sort of equate it with the idea of, like, when an actor puts on a costume or makeup, hair, or when a musician goes out on stage, there's a certain ener… you know, energ… energizing that happens when you go out and you become, you become, you're putting on this character essentially. You're literally wear, physically wearing this character. They have a better understanding, and they can perform to that character. So, like I was starting to say with Zoe, she f… it was very early on she realized, "Oh, I've got these big canine teeth, and I should use those." And so, you know, you could see her growl. You know, she wouldn't initially realize it, but, when she s… sees herself perform, she's like, "Ah, you know, I c… I'm, I'm, I'm a little beastly with this.

15:47Stephen RosenbaumI can, I can go, you know, I understand my character, and I understand, you know, my beauty, my sophistication, my intellect." And, you know, you just get that from the way they carry the, you know, they physically carry themselves. And again, to contrast against what had previously been done to this point was, you know, the actors just performing in a black box with this mo-cap suit and hoping for the best that a year from now, you know, like I say, an army of animators understands what the performance was, the intention, the intended performance was supposed to be. And usually it's not, and usually it's flat, and, you know, you know, not, you know, the actors, you know, rightly were unhappy with those ul… you know, ultimate performances that were essentially watered down, by, like an army of animators. Now they had actual control over it. So, anyway, so that was sort of the general premise.

16:48Stephen RosenbaumAnd then, you know, from that point forward, once we had, technically accomplished that, we were, we were away. We were s… you know, scheduling it just like a normal, shoot. You know, it had a, it had its… Right... You know, the daily num… the sequences that we had to get every single day. You know, the big, the big thing was, you know, taking every, you know, traditional departments and essentially creating the digital equivalent of them. So we had, we had a, instead of an art department, we had a virtual art department, so we called it a VAD. And we had, also part of the art department, we had a, you know, construction crew. So they were in pr… in charge of building, you know, the environments and, you know, the props and so forth, terrain, et cetera. And then constructing all that, putting it all together. We had a team who would set up the initial lighting and so forth. And then, you know, we'd get to, much like a live action shoot, we'd pull open, you know, a file that had an environment, a scene that we wanted to shoot within.

17:56Stephen RosenbaumWe'd position our actors in that space, and then Jim would pick up, what we called a virtual camera. And this allowed him to... Essentially it was like a f… just like a finder or any, looking through a motion picture camera. Yeah. You could, you could see the world. You could move around it. So it was, you know, if you would imagine, it was just a little monitor, but it had little joystick controls on, little handles on each side which had joystick controls. So he could... And they had little mo-cap markers on it, so it was being tracked much like a… Body was being tracked from, in motion capture. So as he moved to the right, the whole, camera point of view in that virtual world would move to the right. So you could get much more sophisticated, you know. You could walk with it, become like a Steadicam. You could say, "You know what? I wanna scale my camera so that I'm now a crane." So i… if I raise it up for every, let's say, foot that I raise it up, make that 10 feet.

19:00Stephen RosenbaumSo I could, you know, start doing this really high boom up just by raising my arms. So if I go, you know, three feet high, that's the equivalent of going, booming up 30 feet. So there's a, it opened up a whole world for him to be able to shoot his movie in a virtual space. So he would, he could see his actors. His actors, he'd look over and see them on the mo-cap stage, and he'd be standing there next to them. But he'd look on a, on his virtual camera, and he'd see the characters that the actors were playing, and he could, you know, stage the scene. Say, "Okay, you stand over here, you stand over here. We're gonna do this, and here's the space." And we've got these, you know, props, essentially proxy props that they might interact with. They were just little mo-cap pieces of things. Let's say like a bow and arrow or whatever. And we'd have the v… the s… the virtual equivalent. So if Neytiri picked up a bow and arrow and, you know, pulled the arrow back, we could see, or sorry, if Zoe picked up a bow, a prop bow and arrow, we could see Neytiri doing the same thing in real time.

20:05Stephen RosenbaumSo Jim could then walk over with his virtual camera and frame that shot, you know, so he could get just the exa… same way he would shoot a live action movie. So, once we got that, you know, we staged the action, then it's just, you know, lines on a script at that point, you know. It's, you know, reading the action or reading the dialogue. Jim, of course, is totally brilliant at choreographing action. You know, I often, you know, I used to sort of to challenge myself as like how much do I know compared to him? And I would l… think about in advance, like how do I sta… how would I stage this? And then he'd come in and, like, do 10 times better job, of course, 'cause that's who he is. But he would, you know, once we, once we figured that out, we would block the scene with the virtual camera, and then we'd go, "Okay, let's do some takes." And we'd start knocking off the takes. And, because we didn't have the physical limitations of a set, meaning, you know, weather, you know, lighting changes were much faster.

21:16Stephen RosenbaumYou know, just the, just the nature of the slowness of a typical live action shoot. We were, we were producing scenes in a… about a quarter of the time that it would take to do if it were live action. So we really moved through a lot and, you know, Jim capitalized on that and basically, was able to shoot, of course, a lot more than he really needed, but it gave him options.

21:46Jawad MirYeah.

21:46Stephen RosenbaumThe other really, beautiful variable involved in this process was that all that data, the visual data, the s… the video that was being recorded from the, from the virtual camera, was being streamed straight into an Avid right on the off s… side of the set.

22:01Jawad MirOh my God, are you serious? That's so cool.

22:04Stephen RosenbaumYes. So you could, so you, we had an editor sitting there and, you know, he would pop, Jim would pop off a take on, you know, let's, you know, he was saying, "Let's shoot Neytiri," you know, framing her, and it would stream right into the Avid, and he, they could just start assembling their movie as they, as they went along. So the entire scene. So he could see that scene being constructed and realize at that moment what he needed, what he didn't need, what he liked, what he didn't like. And so, and then he, you know, like I say, because it was so fast, it c… it could give him options. He's like, "You know, I like this angle, but I also like this angle. Let's just shoot, let's shoot some variants of both, and, you know, bring them into the Avid and I'll decide later. We'll see which one works ul… ultimately in the cut." So it gave, it gave him a lot of flexibility, and the actors loved it. I would say the one limitation that we, that we haven't cracked well, you know, I was talking about how actors can put on, you know, hair or makeup or a costume, and they become that character.

23:08Stephen RosenbaumIt's the same for lighting. You know, when an actor stands on a set and they can feel the light, you know, whatever it is, if they're interior, exterior, they can, they understand where the lighting is. They understand how to work the lighting in that, in that environment. And they perform to it. They really do. And s… because we're on a mo-cap stage, it's really just house lights. It's sterile. You know, we would, you know, dim it a bit, but, you didn't have any kind of directional light sources. You didn't have any kind of ambient light sources. So they couldn't really, other than looking at the monitor, you know, after between the takes, they could understand at that point, okay, the sun's back here. I understand it's coming here and it's rimming my head, so if I move in a certain way, I can get a really nice edge lighting here and catch my eye and so forth. The actors do think about that. And so, we just physically couldn't emulate that. It was, you know, then it becomes, you know, the, you know, much more like a live action shoot.

24:13Stephen RosenbaumSo there are some negatives to it.

24:16Jawad MirYeah

24:16Stephen Rosenbaum... There's a lot more negatives to it, of course, in the process, but there are plenty of positives if it, for the right instance.

24:24Jawad MirYeah. I think for me, a couple of points. Andy Serkis obviously, you know, I think the motion capture technology, if I'm not mistaken, kinda got initiated in Lord of the Rings, the second one, The Two Towers, right, is it called? I think.

24:38Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

24:39Jawad MirAnd then, you know, how he sort of became the primary person to do King Kong and then Adventures of Tintin and all that. And then to see that transform into such a grand scale level with Avatar, you know, you talked about Zoe. I think for me, her character, and you were talking about her expression, then I remember how she says, you know, "You should not be here." Right?

25:03Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

25:03Jawad MirLike there's that line. And her expressions, I feel, nothing to take away from anybody else, any other actor, were probably in the first film the most powerful ones. Like she was really into the character, and she w… probably was very aware of the fact of the, how the expressions are gonna be transformed into that motion capture…

25:23Stephen RosenbaumYeah

25:23Jawad Mir... Technology. Do you think…

25:25Stephen RosenbaumShe should, she should've been nominated, honestly. I mean she, it's again, sorry to interrupt, but it's, it…

25:30Jawad MirYeah, it's fine

25:31Stephen Rosenbaum... This is the thing is like the actors are so afraid. It's such a, it's they're just so like, oh, this is, this is a digital character. We can't, we can't, we can't offer any accolades for that. And it was Zoe's performance, to your point. It was 100% her. She delivered that performance on a character, you know, that happened to be digital makeup instead of real makeup. Anyway.

25:55Jawad MirYeah.

25:56Stephen RosenbaumSorry, go on.

25:57Jawad MirNo. It's fine. Well, she did win the Oscar two weeks ago just to…

26:00Stephen RosenbaumShe did

26:00Jawad Mir... Make up for the

26:02Stephen RosenbaumWell deserved for that one

26:02Jawad Mir... For, I mean she is a very talented actress and very incredible human being from what I've read. But going back to, what I was, saying with the technology, how Avatar... So the world of Avatar, right? Like when you first see it, okay, the first time I saw it was like, whoa. Right? Like it looked amazing. But again, going back to what you and I have sort of talked about in the past, the story, despite being very simple story, but just, it was just done so well that you get immersed so much into the characters and the story. And even to this day, like when I, even when I was saw The Way of the Water, you know, two, three years ago, it's just again, the characters and the story, and you completely forget about the motion capture. And without not naming any films, but there are motion capture films where you do realize, okay, this is motion captured. Right?

26:57Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

26:57Jawad MirLike I, with Avatar it's not the case. And few other exceptions. But yeah, hats off to again, James and yourself and your team is that how you guys articulated the VFX in such a way where it served the story first before anything else.

27:15Stephen RosenbaumYeah. We're, we were, we were thrilled to do it. I mean, it was an opportunity for us to really leverage technologies that we knew were capable, they were out there. And use it the right way. You know, use it the way it was complementing an actor's ability to del… to deliver a performance. It didn't bec… the technology did not become the performance. The…

27:44Stephen Rosenbaum... The actor was the performance. And, you know, we had to, th… that was a mandate certainly f… you know, a personal mandate that we all had, we all shared, but Jim was driving that home continually. Like don't, don't mess with the actor's performance. Just, you know, this needs to be 100% true to the performances. It be, the reason I think a lot of mocap performances stray or fail is because they stray off of that performance because it is data that can be manip… manipulated, in post. And I think that's where actors are freaked out about.

28:26Jawad MirYeah.

28:26Stephen RosenbaumYou know, it's like, you know, oh, you're gonna, you're gonna change me. You're gonna do something that's not what I would do. And, it is true. We can, we can do that. But, you know, th… certainly on this show, and we w… we were 100% behind it. Like, why mess with that? You know, don't, don't let the technology drive that. It should be 100% the creative process.

28:50Jawad MirRight. So at that time, I mean now, you know, with the second that came out three years ago, I don't even remember, maybe two years ago, and then the third one comes out this December. So the process for these kind of films is very long, right? Like from s… scripting to pre-production, to production, to post. I think nowadays it's probably, from what I remember, probably good four to five, six years combination of two film, maybe even a bit longer. But back then, it came out in 2009. How long was the, because it was a first of its kind, from the time that you're on the film or just the pre-production until it's done, what's the timeline like?

29:31Stephen RosenbaumI was on for three years. The, there was a year of tech development beforehand before they actually started to do proper production work. So you know, Glenn, I mentioned Glenn Derry. He, you know, he was developing these technologies and trying to figure out how to make it work. So there was just a small team in 2006, and then I came on in January 2007, and it came out in December of 2009. So it was, you know, I think that's, you know, the qu… the qualifications are in terms of time was it was n… new technologies that, you know, we certainly had some stumbling blocks that we had to get around and or figure out how to resolve. But also, you know, Jim, you know, he had total control in a much less costly, environment.

30:32Stephen RosenbaumYou know, y… you know, with, if you're doing live action, you have a mandate to get through your certain number of days, certain number of setups every single day, and you have only X number of days to get through the shoot, and anything over is gonna be, you know, hell to pay. This was a much, you know, because it was on a mocap stage A much less expensive, situation, smaller team.

30:57Stephen RosenbaumSo he could, he had, it afforded him the ability to literally to play a bit. And that really, I think it contributed to the, to the schedule going a little long, but to the benefit of the show, I think, ultimately. And I think most people agree with that, although they don't see... I mean, I th… I have recollections of the movie initially being, like, three and a half hours long. And you know, there was, it was really not until month to three months before we released it December of 2009 where they f… he finally brought it under the three-hour mark. There was a lot of, like, "This can't be three hour, three-plus hours." so he had to, he had to make hard decisions on, he had a lot of material that he had to cut and, but I think it's, you know, again, to have that wealth of options and to be able to…

31:51Jawad MirYeah

31:51Stephen Rosenbaum... Is really, I think, a director's dream, and it certainly does help the filmmaking process. You can't, you can't just shoot…

31:59Jawad MirSure

31:59Stephen Rosenbaum... You never shoot just exactly what's in the script. You kinda have to give yourself some options. 'Cause ultimately you get into editorial and you're like, "I can't make this scene work, and I need to, you know, I need to do some pickups," and you end up going back and reshooting stuff at great expense.

32:14Jawad MirNo, 100%. It's, it's incredible how, even, you know, when you write a script and you rewrite it, and then you, when you see a location, you're like, "Oh, okay, so let's just, let me redo," you know, not necessarily the essence of the script, but just tweaking things here and there just to…

32:33Stephen RosenbaumYeah

32:33Jawad Mir... Because it changes stuff. It changes stuff completely. But in this case, everything is like a stage, right? Like, you're like, you're working on a sound stage. But yeah, you're getting all the real live, feed. But still, to be able to have that vision and to make it last that long, and you said it was longer. Do you remember anything specific that was cut out that you enjoyed working on, or was that something that you can't talk about because of NDA?

32:58Stephen RosenbaumI can't talk about it. There were, there were some, there were two scenes in particular I was like, "Oh," you know, would love. You know, maybe one day there'll be a director's cut that will, it'll come out. But you know, it's part of the filmmaking process, right?

33:15Jawad MirYeah, I know. I get it. I get it.

33:16Stephen RosenbaumSometimes you have to make some really hard decisions, and you're kinda like, "Oh, does it service the movie?" Or you know, or at some point, or you know. And it, and it, I think to keep in mind this, the concept of behind this movie was so abstract, right?

33:30Jawad MirYeah.

33:30Stephen RosenbaumI mean, it was like, we weren't sure if people were gonna respond to it honestly. There was a lot of nervousness. But

33:38Jawad MirI mean, look at that. It made over a billion bucks.

33:41Stephen RosenbaumIt made, I think close to three bill… three…

33:44Jawad MirThree billion. Three billion, yeah.

33:45Stephen RosenbaumYeah. Yeah. I think it's close to that. Probably over that now. The, just coming back for a second just 'cause you touched on…

33:54Jawad MirSure

33:54Stephen Rosenbaum... On, Rings and Tintin and all that. So Andy didn't, Andy Serkis didn't have the benefit of the real time. He had some real time in body, but he, the facial capture was pretty primitive in those days. It was really on Avatar that we sort of really established…

34:12Jawad MirSure

34:12Stephen Rosenbaum... This as a fluid pipeline, a fluid workflow. And, Steven Spielberg picked up on it, and that sort of, I think, motivated him to, and Peter Jackson, 'cause we were doing Avatar with Weta, to do Tintin. So that they actually, like, halfway through our shoot, they were in the, in the warehouse, down the street, in Los Angeles doing, starting to do Tintin. And the, Steven was eating it up. I mean, he was like this, he just im… completely embraced it. I've seen a lot of directors, you know, really take it in and just see it as an extension of a new tool, new technologies that allow them to do what they're very familiar with, you know, basically make it easier to use their skills. Much like you hear, you know, the comments about gen AI now. "Oh, it's voodoo."

35:04Jawad MirYeah.

35:04Stephen RosenbaumAnd you know what? It's actually just a, just a powerful tool set to what we do every day. But he shot, Tintin using s… pretty much the same technology as we had developed on Avatar while we were still shooting Avatar. And in fact, I think, I think he finished before we did.

35:23Jawad MirBefore you guys.

35:25Stephen RosenbaumSo he started later and finished before us. He was, you know, typical Steven, very efficient filmmaker, and got through the process, you know, basically using the same technologies.

35:41Jawad MirYeah. Which it came, it came two years after, though, I think, two or three years after, Avatar, if my memory serves me right. But you know, going back to Avatar, the whole story of the weak versus the mighty powerful, I mean, it's, you know, it's been done so many times. But again, there's just something about it, that the underdog story speaks to people, but especially in this visual format. For me, and I think for a lot of people, and I read about this... Actually, before I go on, just to talk about the duration, I was just reading James Cameron's interview a few days ago, was it yesterday? That the next film, Fire and Ash or Ash and Fire, I think it's called, one or the other, it's more, much longer than the last film, so it's probably…

36:27Jawad Mir... Over three and a half hours long. But going back to Avatar, original one, the sequence, and, pardon my kn… s… knowledge base on the terminology of the species and the characters in the film. The sequence where they jump on these birds, right? The gigantic birds.

36:47Stephen RosenbaumYeah. The Banshees? Yeah.

36:48Jawad MirThe Banshees. I remember reading James Cameron's interview that how the executives at Fox, I think it was, they were like, "This is, like, way too long. Nobody's gonna like it." And I think Jam… Jim fought for that, and that sequence turned out to be the most liked by the audience. It was long…

37:06Stephen RosenbaumYeah

37:06Jawad Mir... But it never felt long. Do you…

37:08Stephen RosenbaumYeah

37:08Jawad Mir... Do you, were you sort of… Part of that sequence in any way? If so, in w… at what capacity? I would love to hear that.

37:15Stephen RosenbaumYeah, I mean, I mean, I should talk about... So my role, I technically was an employee of Weta. So, the guy who runs Weta, Joe Letteri, he's a, he's a longtime friend and, peer of mine. We worked at ILM together. We worked on Terminator 2 together and so forth. And then he went down, I think, for the second Rings and, never came back. He went down to Wellington, New Zealand, and just… You know, why would you really? I mean, it's like…

37:48Jawad MirOf course.

37:49Stephen RosenbaumSo…

37:49Jawad MirJim is down there too.

37:51Stephen RosenbaumYeah, now Jim is down there. So I had continued, to work with him, and when Avatar came up, he asked if I could be, you know, essentially the Weta representative at, Lightstorm. So the Lightstorm is Jim's production company.

38:07Jawad MirYep.

38:07Stephen RosenbaumAnd they were the ones doing the whole, virtual production shoot. And so, I was basically the guy there embedded sitting with Jim every day on the mocap stage, you know, working with him. And there was a… another guy who worked for Lightstorm, w… Richie Baneham, who was, also there, and he was, he was also the sort of the creative, the animation creative, if you would. So Weta had its animation supervisor, Andy Jones, and, Richie was the Lightstorm representative. So m… making sure that we're, preserving and protecting the actors' performances and all the creatures that came up that needed animate… specific cr… creature animation. The banshees and the thanators and the so forth. They... Richie was in charge of that. So I stuck with Jim on the, on all the performance capture. And then…

39:08Stephen Rosenbaum... So we did that for a, we did that for a year, and then, so that was all of 2007. And then in 2008, at some point, we went down to Wellington to shoot the live action part, so with the, with the physical…

39:25Jawad MirRight

39:26Stephen Rosenbaum... Actors.

39:26Jawad MirYeah.

39:26Stephen RosenbaumSo it was, you know, Sigourney and Sam and so forth, doing when they were humans. That was six months in Wellington, and then we came back for another six months to the live, to the r… to the virtual production stage, to do more performance capture. And so that was the basically the two years of making, and then the final year I went down, 2009, I went down for the final year d… back down to Wellington. And, it was funny. I walked in my office and there was like dust on all of my nothing untouched. I'd been gone for two years, literally. And, I had a, we had, Joe had divided... He was the lead creative on the show. So he had divided the show up into five groups. So I was, I had my team essentially and, you know, set of sequences, and I would guide them through. And there were like four other teams that were supervisors that were guiding it through.

40:27Stephen RosenbaumSo, that's how it was essentially structured. In terms of, you know, specifically like the, you know, the floating mountain scene with the banshees and so forth, that was... Yeah, I mean, I, we were all, I was there with, you know, through everything basically, all the, all the capture for that. So that was, you know, much like a live action shoot but, you know, with stunts. We built, except we didn't have to build the real thing. We build these proxy mountains, these mountain faces…

41:02Jawad MirYeah. Yeah

41:03Stephen Rosenbaum... Which were like, you know, essentially like rock climbing walls, and they could climb. The actors could climb up these rock climbing walls, and we were capturing them as they're climbing. So they were really climbing. It was really, it was, you know, a really good way to do it. And then they'd get up to the, to the rookery, the br… banshee rookery, and, you know, Sam, who played, Jake, he would, you know, he went after his banshee, and then he would wrestle with that, and that would be a stuntman essentially that he was wrestling with. And, you know, trying to connect his line to hi… to the banshee. So, yeah, I think y… you could see for our purposes it was not only great action, but it was an opportunity to show off the beauty of the environments. I mean…

41:55Jawad MirYeah

41:55Stephen Rosenbaum... You know, those, that the floating mountains were spectacular and the waterfalls that just dropped to infinity and, you know, and then flying. It's just, you know, it's classic fantasy storytelling, right? And so…

42:10Jawad MirYeah

42:10Stephen Rosenbaum... I think people ate that up.

42:12Jawad MirI think those mountains were inspired by, there are some mountains in China that's similar, obviously not floating in the air, but similar…

42:21Stephen RosenbaumYes

42:21Jawad Mir... Kind of design. I think j… they got inspired from that.

42:24Stephen RosenbaumThat's very true. We actually sent, one of our art directors to these mountains. There's a f… there's two different ones. Very similar look. And they, he went and, you know, was in heaven, took tons and tons of pictures. And so we followed the look of that obviously with the, there's no bottom to them so they were floating.

42:48Jawad MirYeah.

42:48Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

42:48Jawad MirYeah. Yeah, no, it's, it's a beautiful film, man. Like, even, you know, I showed my kids the first one before we went to see the second one, and now I can't wait for the third one, you know, the three elements, earth, water, and fire.

43:05Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

43:05Jawad MirAnd i… it's just to be able to... I even remember it when before the second one came out, everybody's like, "How is this film gonna work? It's been 13 years or so since the first one came out. Do people even remember?" And lo and behold, it made another, what, $2 billion. To you, I mean, again, to me it's story, but what it i… what is it about, is it Jim's fan base plus the… The motion capture plus the story, that these stories... L… listen, I'm, I'm gonna be very honest. Like, Jim's dialogues are not, you know, thought-provoking in a sense of, like, English poetry or anything, English literature, but they are something that people relate to at a very personal level. And maybe…

43:47Stephen RosenbaumHe knows…

43:47Jawad Mir... I think... Sorry, go on.

43:49Stephen RosenbaumYeah. He… no, he knows how to tell a story, plain and simple.

43:51Jawad MirYeah.

43:52Stephen RosenbaumHe's a superb storyteller. It is the fundamental thing that li… is lacking in most cinema events, right? They're just, whether you're, you know, whether it's TV or movies or some live event, it's, th… there always has to be a story there that people, it resonates with. That's, that's how we communicate, right? And he's quite skilled at that. I think he also knows how to choreograph action very well, keep it interesting. He knows when to choreograph…

44:26Jawad MirRight

44:26Stephen Rosenbaum... The action too.

44:27Jawad MirYeah.

44:27Stephen RosenbaumIt's not just, you know, the gratuitous superhero movie. And then, h… you know, one other thing which I, which has come up I think in the past, but couldn't be said enough, he has, always has a strong female character.

44:42Jawad MirYeah.

44:42Stephen RosenbaumAnd I think, I think that is, you know, that's intentional, and he, I think it brings in a larger fan base as a result. You know, too many of the action movies these days are, you know, aimed towards a male demographic. And, he knows he needs to appeal to the whole audience. And so I think he kn… he's very skilled at doing that.

45:08Jawad MirAnd I think what that also does is, to your point, is that when you have a female character that's there, you know, as a main character or somewhat of a main character, it plays the opposite to a male character, right? And then there is that chemistry, and there is that connection, and I think people appreciate that because that relatability, I mean, who cannot relate to that?

45:30Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

45:30Jawad MirRight?

45:30Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

45:30Jawad MirLike, you know, s… I think to me, aside from that is very important. I mean, I think he does that because I think I read that he had a great relationship with his mom, if my memory serves me right. And, but that chemistry and that o… opposition that, you know, disagreement or agreement, I think that really resonates with people. Obviously, it has to be done properly, which is why, which is how he does it, and it's fabulous to see.

45:58Stephen RosenbaumI think so. I think, you know, to summarize, I think he's, he has tremendous creative instinct, but he also, you know, to be fair, he does his homework. Not like, unlike a lot of directors out there that... He does a lot of homework, and he is, he im… im… just embeds into the story. He be, he gets into the point, into it to the point where he's passionate. He wants everybody else to be passionate. I mean, I would say the biggest thing about Jim, and, you know, people, you hear stories about, you know, is he, is he a difficult guy? My experience was exactly opposite. He's, he's a s… he's incredibly, generous and sweet man. He, as long as you pay attention and you're trying to keep up with him, there's no way... I mean, he's, he's, he's three steps ahead of you on any conversation. He's very smart. But he sees whether or not you're engaged, and if you're not engaged, he'll call you out on it.

47:03Stephen RosenbaumSo he's, he goes in with this passion, this drive. He's like, "I put my, I put my soul into this project. I want, I'm, I need your help with it, and I expect you to come along and help me." And if you don't keep up, he's gonna, he'll call you on it. So I didn't have that experience. I recognized that right from the beginning. He was…

47:24Jawad MirYeah

47:24Stephen Rosenbaum... He's like, "Just stay with me, and I'll, and things will be great." And I found him to be a wonderful person to work with, and I'd work with him again, anytime. I c… I was sad that I couldn't work on the second one. I, actually, my wife had some health problems, so I had to, I could… I couldn't. It wasn't, the timing wasn't right. So, but these g… they're doing a great job, those guys.

47:46Jawad MirYeah. No, a… a… and to your point about, you know, the rumors about James Cameron being this and that, I think just like at any company, any job, if you're not doing the job you're supposed to do, you're going to be called out on it. And people take that as a sign of, bullying, but it's really not, because you're getting paid to be there.

48:08Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

48:08Jawad MirAnd if you're not doing your job, then you shouldn't be there or at least t… or up it a bit. Like, you know, m… people…

48:15Stephen RosenbaumYeah

48:15Jawad Mir... Things happen with people. But yeah, the, I'd, I never pay attention to that stuff. I mean, there's stuff said about everybody that's X, Y, Z is like this. Nobody knows what the deeper stories are and the inner intricacies and everything. But yeah, are you looking forward to the next Avatar? I'm sure you are. Did…

48:32Stephen RosenbaumI am.

48:32Jawad MirWhat did you think of the second one?

48:35Stephen RosenbaumI thought, I thought it was really good. I, it, to me, to your p… comment a moment ago, too much time went by, and I think that y… you had a, that was the, to me, the most noticeable thing. There was sort of a, momentum loss, if you would.

48:52Stephen RosenbaumAnd I think there was, you know... It's kind of like r… I mean, for me, I grew up in the Star Wars age, and so it was…

48:59Jawad MirYeah

49:00Stephen Rosenbaum... You know, you're, you're just, you c… you gotta, you're, you can't wait for the next edition to come out. Like, you know, same with the Harry Potter books. It's like y… you can't, i… if... 13 years was just too long. I mean, he had his other things he wanted to do. He went off and dove the Marianas Trench and

49:16Jawad MirYeah

49:16Stephen Rosenbaum... I remember, I remember him showing me the design on that sub, and I thought he was crazy. But it was... You know, it's just he had these other ambitions. So, anyway, I think, yeah, so that to me was the momentum thing is like y… you know… I started watching a show, what, Severance, is it? Yesterday.

49:39Jawad MirYeah. The Apple TV one. Yeah.

49:40Stephen RosenbaumIt's like it's been years, and I'm like... And they were showing the preview, and I'm like, "Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, w… wait." And y… you're trying to remember some of the stuff, and it's, even though you get the previously on Severance, you get…

49:54Jawad MirYeah

49:54Stephen Rosenbaum... You d… you kinda lose that, you know, you were, you, I was into it. And so I think it was the same with Avatar. It was like even though I worked on it, I felt like there was just a loss of momentum. So, you know, 15 minutes later you're into it and you're like…

50:11Jawad MirYeah

50:11Stephen Rosenbaum... "Oh, yeah, I get this," and so forth. But what did you think?

50:14Jawad MirOh, I loved it. I absolutely loved it. I thought the, especially for me, obviously as a family story, that was the core of it. But that technology they had where they had, the young kid, again, I forget the character's name or the actor's name, who was integrated into the world. I mean, it was just so seamless. I was trying, I saw it two times in theaters. For the first time, I was trying to find problems. I'm like, "Where can you see something is o…" I just couldn't find it. It was just done so brilliantly…

50:51Stephen RosenbaumYeah

50:51Jawad Mir... That there was absolutely no flaw in the tech side of things. But I love the story. I, you know, the whole family story. I mean, again, it's been done so many times before, but just the way he does it's different.

51:03Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

51:03Jawad MirAnd I, and I can't wait for the third one. And, you know, it, these are great stories, and I'm, I'm glad that he's gonna, I think, I think he said it that he's not gonna direct the fourth or fifth one.

51:15Jawad MirHe wants to do something more s… smaller and personal. But, I think for me the third one should be the end of it and not go beyond. But hey, I'm not the one running 20th Century Fox or Lightstorm, so not my, not my decision.

51:29Stephen RosenbaumDisney now. It's Disney now.

51:29Jawad MirDisney, that's right. It's Disney now.

51:31Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

51:31Jawad MirThat's right. I forgot. I forgot

51:34Stephen Rosenbaum... Yeah, I don't know. I mean, we'll have to see what he does on the third one. I actually don't know anything about it. You know, I know people are working on it, but, I've been, I'm now entirely removed but, from it, so it, which is kind of sad for me but, you know, at the same time it's exciting 'cause I get to get surprised.

51:54Jawad MirYeah

51:55Stephen Rosenbaum... But.

51:55Jawad Mir100%. I think, I think a trailer should come out anytime soon. I mean, we're just, what, seven, eight months away, so I'm sure we'll see a teaser in the next month or two.

52:03Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

52:03Jawad MirAt least when the summer kicks off, so excited about that. Awesome, man. This has been great as usual. I mean, we can talk about this for hours and hours, but maybe another time, but, it's been informative. I learned something new, and just the way you articulate everything, it's just so nice to hear from you and also for me, as well as our viewers, so we really appreciate it.

52:24Stephen RosenbaumHappy to do it. Happy to do it. Glad we got the opportunity.

52:28Jawad MirAwesome. Let's stay in touch, man.

52:30Stephen RosenbaumOkay. Take care.

52:31Jawad MirAll right, Steven. Take care.

52:33Stephen RosenbaumBye.

52:34Jawad MirBye-bye.