Output details

Populating Pandora’s skies for the Academy Award-winning film Avatar (2009) for Industrial Light & Magic.

As the complexity of computer animated features increases the digital artist is put under increasing pressure to continue to deliver quality output that is on time and on budget. The solution to this problem built on character animation research that came to fruition in Walt Disney's blockbuster films Happy Feet (2006), Spiderman (2007) and Disney’s Dinosaur (2000). Maguire was thus able to exploit the research potential at the nexus where technology and art met.

An invitation from Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas’s Academy Award-wining motion picture and visual effects company to join a small crew to create 200 shots for Avatar (2009), directed by James Cameron provided the context to with solve design systems and artist interaction issues that had arisen due to the projects escalating complexity. In particular, populating the skies of Pandora with thousands of Banshee’s and their Navi riders.

Maguire designed and implemented a higher level interface to manage the application of animation cycles from different sources to a single asset with multiple resolutions for an animator friendly and art-directable crowd system. Based on some of his earlier research presented at a seminar sponsored by Avid|Softimage, SIGGRAPH 2004 on Crowd Distribution Using the Non-linear Animation Framework in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, ILM were able to deliver their completed shots to Lightstorm Entertainment on time and on budget. It is difficult to put a monetary figure on the impact of Maguire's work on Avatar (2009) as it is such a large project and team but the numbers around Avatar (2009) are staggering; $237M dollar budget. $77M US opening weekend. $2.73B worldwide gross. Won 3 Oscars, in Art Direction, Cinematography and Best Achievement in Visual Effects with 6 Oscar nominations. Worldwide it won 28 awards with 58 nominations.