“Before that,” continues Champney, “there were often these conservative CG shots where you do a slow pan, or a locked-off camera, and you say, ‘Okay, the CG will be there, let’s leave some negative space…’.

That was the first real use of the simul-cam system where Jim could be ‘live compositing ‘and framing the shots with both the CG and the live-action characters together.”

“On the first film, one of the big scenes was when Jake Sully first goes into his avatar body and he gets off the bed and then he’s kind of frantically stumbling around. “There also wasn’t a lot of human/Na’vi interaction, just a handful of scenes,” observes Lightstorm Entertainment virtual production supervisor Ryan Champney, who orchestrated the eyeline system on The Way of Water. The idea for the eyeline system emanated from the experience on the first Avatar (released in 2009), where virtual production and simul-cam approaches were still back then completely novel. How the eyeline system came about Ryan Champney.

Avatar: The Way of Water for windows instal