Word: gimbal
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...jousting pole. To approximate Pandora's moss-covered terrain, he laid plastic sheets on the floor, forcing the cast to walk gingerly. When Zoe Saldana, who plays Jake's Na'vi love interest Neytiri, was "riding" a flying creature, she clung to a giant gray hobbyhorse rocked on a gimbal by grips. For scenes that combined live action with CG, Cameron used a new tool called a Simulcam, which allowed him to see actors playing in exotic CG surroundings in real time. Cameron's goal was to shoot as if he were filming a documentary on another planet...
...Warner Bros. soundstage No. 16, a shipping vessel doubling for the Andrea Gail was harbored in a large tank 22-ft. deep (the same tank where Spencer Tracy sailed in The Old Man and the Sea 42 years ago). In front of a blue screen, mounted on a gimbal, the Andrea Gail tossed and turned while the actors (in addition to Clooney and Wahlberg, the boat's crew includes John C. Reilly, Allen Payne, John Hawkes and William Fichtner) employed their craft amid wind machines and torrents of pelting water. Meanwhile, just up the California coast at ILM headquarters...
Since the gimbal could turn the boat only so much, the ILM crew had to jostle it further after scanning footage into the computer. And since no miniatures were used, "for a very wide shot," says ILM's associate effects supervisor Doug Smythe, "the boat would be computer-generated as well." At times, so were the actors. During a sequence in which Clooney climbs an outrigger to cut loose a flailing stabilizer, a CG double was created for certain camera angles. (Basically, when you're not seeing Clooney's face, you're seeing a digital dummy...
...must tell you, to see this 70-foot boat - I don't know how many thousands of pounds of steel were held on that gimbal. It was rocking and rolling like crazy and smashed with these huge loads of water, actors being on it, cameras all over the place. It was an awesome sight and sometimes it just stopped your heart. You don't know if at some point things would break - how can a gimbal hold this huge boat? There was always some kind of pressure and tension there when we did that. But it did fine. It worked...
...wanted to go for reality and do it as real as possible. I'm a little bit experienced with that kind of filmmaking from "Das Boot," and in that film when we had depth charges detonating around the submarine or that stuff, we also worked with a huge gimbal. It was really frightening, but I just loved it. The actors like it too because it's not bad to have something really tough to fight against. If tons of water comes over them, it's high adrenaline to act in a situation like that. It also makes it look...