On the future of 3D environments, Letteri looks to improve on the “CityBot” used to create New York City in Kong and extend it to build any type of environment, not just cityscapes.

JL: Well, we’re early days, so there could certainly be that coming up. To me it’s not the problem that’s most interesting [about the project]. So you’re only going to use that in those situations where it’s too dangerous for an actor. So if it does come up, I’m sure we’ll dig into it and tackle it. But the idea is to get a full-on performance that you can carry a movie with.

BD: What can you tell us about Avatar at this point?

JL: I think it’s going to be a combination of a lot of the things that we’ve been doing that you and I have been discussing. There’s performance capture techniques out there that really allow us to work in realtime with actors that allow us to develop the characters. And then just allowing the time to work with it after the fact, because the characters -- no matter what you do on a performance capture stage -- really come alive when you get them into the scenes and get them lit and rendered and see what they really look like and how they behave. And that always influences your perception of them. You start making adjustments to bits of the performance that you might need to do just to bring them alive. In a CG performance sometimes you need to add a little life, so you might add a little movement to the eyes. It’s stuff you start to define once you’re in there working with it that alters it in a subtle way. The final result is what you’re going to see on screen.

BD: What kind of toolset fine-tuning are you planning?

JL: We’ll be building on what we have here because we have a pretty robust toolset for character animation. Again, we’ll look at that a lot more once we see what the performances are and see what we need to do to bring it all alive.

BD: And does the added immersion with 3-D excite you?

JL: Yeah, the 3-D stuff looks really cool. We’ve been doing some tests for ourselves just internally. When you do everything in a 3-D world digitally, then you can play with different things and figure out what works, and start to answer the questions about how to watch a 3-D movie without getting a headache. We’re learning about how to do it properly and it’s been really good to chew through those problems.

BD: Moving on to the 3D environments, what are you looking to improve?

JL: Probably in general to use the same technique we used to create New York City in Kong [Maya-based software from Chris White dubbed “CityBot” rebuilt the city, floor-by-floor, section-by-section, block-by-block, adding intricate and period-accurate detail to the low-res dataset.] And extend it to build any type of environment, not just cityscapes. As you get more and more down the line, different locations that are called for are hard to reproduce. And it’s not just fantasy. It’s getting more and more difficult to do big scenes like New York in a real location. The amount of cleanup and replacement and set extension that you have to do dovetails into, “Gee, we just replaced that digitally -- we could’ve done the whole thing that way.” So we’re looking at that for various types of environments to give us the freedom to answer that question.

Letteri is presently working on The Water Horse and its mysterious Scottish sea creature, due for release next December.

BD: With Avatar, there was work done by Rob Legato in creating a virtual production studio in L.A. How does that fit in with your current plans?

JL: That’s still the basis of everything he’s doing and that dovetails nicely with the system that we’ve developed down here. We wound up using a lot of the same technologies and things. There’s not that much of a difference. Probably the real difference is one of approach. Rob has created an immersive system, which is necessary for Avatar. Whereas our system was designed mostly to work with things that had been shot on set and to add motion capture into those. We’re finding it very compatible, which allows us to keep a consistent workflow back and forth. We both use the Giant system for motion capture. The rest involves developing an infrastructure around that to support the film.

BD: What can you tell us about The Water Horse and the mysterious Scottish sea creature?

JL: We’re right in the middle of that… going through our first pass on the animation blocking and getting everything up to speed. Where it plays into what we’ve been discussing is in the area of character design and character performance. The main character is really fun to work with and it’s been great to continue what we did [with Kong].

BD: And how is Fantastic Four 2 going?

JL: We’re still early days on that but the obvious question is you want something with a cool silver look to it. We’ve been coming up with some things on that. So that’s more like taking what they’re doing onset and use that to drive the Silver Surfer.

Bill Desowitz is editor of VFXWorld.