The Evolution Of 3D Cinema Techniques Through Avatar

The purpose of the thesis has been to show the evolution of digital cinema techniques in the very last years and to underline how the innovations brought by the movie "Avatar" of James Cameron within the Motion Capture and the 3D technique.
In facing the work, I started to trace a short history both of Motion Capture and of 3D. The first one was born back in 1878 with "The Horse in motion", a sequence of images created by the naturalist photographer Edward Muybridge and evolves through continuous improvements and inventions, like the Rotoscoping, used in cartoons, to arrive in 1995 to the success of videogames with "FX Fighter". The history of 3D is deeply rooted in the discover of the stereogram and in the invention, of 1852, of the first stereoscopic instrument.
Then, I carried on analyzing the two main techniques of Motion Capture; that with optical systems which uses markers formed by a retro-reflective material or light-emitting LEDs and that with non-optical systems which uses sensors applied to the body of the subject to transfer the movement on the computer’s screen. I analyzed the main methods of 3D technology, including Computer Generated Images (CGI), typical of animation movies.
The top of Motion Capture and 3D has been achieved with the realization of the movie "Avatar" of the director James Cameron. Among the innovations brought by the director, the most important is surely the use of a new camera realized by the same Cameron that patented a shooting system called Simul-Cam.
After "Avatar", 3D knew a considerable expansion that involved not only cinema, but also television, videogames world and much more.