Special effects in Avatar made possible thanks to European technology

A joint UK/German collaboration has helped change film production worldwide, turning a work-intensive craft process into viable technology that adds a high level of realism to special effects. Results of this work have since won technical oscars for many of the researchers involved.

Core Facts

Thanks to a projects started by a few European companies about 10 years ago, levels of realism in high-resolution imaging that were unimaginable at the time were made possible.
UK company FilmLIght played a crucial role in this transformation through a range of high productivity software products based on breakthroughs in the EUREKA E! 1683 FILM SPECIAL EFFECTS project that finished in 1998.
The result of FILM SPECIAL EFFECTS was a step change in technology it meant you could suddenly start to cut out and combine images together at a higher quality and higher productivity than had ever been done before, says Stansfield. Such things were not totally new but had only been achieved at a much lower level more labour intensively and much, much slower that really limited the amount that you could do.
With the technology emerging from the EUREKA project, special effects became cheaper, faster and better.
This EUREKA project made a difference to global filmmaking, says Stansfield. The results were initially adopted in London but Hollywood pretty soon came knocking at the door and bought many, many copies. And there has been an enormous market more recently in New Zealand for licenses for use on the Lord of the Rings series. More recently, Framestore participated in the creation of the special effects of box office hits Avatar and Where the Wild Things Are.