More Avatar bits

In a time of constant “spy reports” and production minutiae available online for almost every movie, you have to admit — they’ve done a pretty incredible job keeping AVATAR a secret. The project has been in the works for years, and is due in just a few months, and almost nothing has been revealed to the salivating masses about James Cameron’s sci-fi epic.

The new issue of Empire has some snaps of Cameron on his sets and talked with him about the tech he’s developed for his project. Some interesting and bold statements from Cameron: “We’ve eliminated the animation from animation,” and “With the capture technologies we developed, the actor can be any character they can imagine and the director can create any world, any time and any space.”

With his new gear, the filmmaker can essentially shoot actors on green-screen sets and watch the (nearly) finished product on a monitor — in real-time. (He can also instantly make people nine feet tall and blue, it seems.) Cameron also implies that sampling this tech was basically what prompted Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson to go make TINTIN their next film.

In addition, the 3D-focused site Marketsaw extracted and extrapolated some additional info from Empire’s behind the scenes pics — check them out RIGHT HERE.