As part of my degree I am doing Cinema Studies which like all other subjects has week readings. This week was on mise-en-scene which translates from French to ‘put in the scene.’ It refers to everything seen by the audience including lighting, props, setting, costuming and more. But the part of the reading I found most interesting was when it was talking about computer generated characters and images, as well as motion capture technology. On example the book used was the film Avartar. The director wanted to make the characters look as realistic as possible which meant that using makeup and prosthetics wouldn’t achieve the best result. Thus, they used motion capture technology where they had these helmets with cameras on them to capture even the smallest of facial movements. I found this fascinating due to the incredible technology that was being used, but also the way the actors were able to forget about the helmets and other things they had to wear, and just focused on their performance.

I also watched a video about the making of Avatar on Youtube which you can watch here