Avatar featurette proves the actors did a ton of acting

The term “performance capture” may tend to conjure visions of those creepy unblinking Zemeckis-made automatons from movies like POLAR EXPRESS and BEOWULF. But director James Cameron has long insisted that AVATAR was a quantum leap in the process, and that every bit of his actors’ performances was present in the finished product.

But explaining and showing are different things, especially when it comes to convincing people who might be voting for major awards. (And, well, I suppose the rest of you sorta matter.) So this interesting new behind-the-scenes video demonstrates not just the cool tech that Cameron and his team have been concocting over the past few years, but also how the film’s stars and their work literally translated to their blue counterparts.

If you didn’t buy the hype that this movie was the “game changer” it had been heralded as, try to envision these toys in the hands of other talented filmmakers and gifted actors…