Kennesaw State is rolling out the red carpet for two former students who helped create one of the highest grossing films of all time, “Avatar: The Way of Water.”
Bill Lorton and Vaughn Cato wrote much of the core software program for the motion capture used in the epic film that just won an Academy Award for best visual effects. The two men will be the featured speakers at an event on the Marietta Campus on April 6.
“It’s almost too much to think about when you consider the record-breaking, worldwide success of the Avatar series,” said Lorton. “We just try to stay humble.”
Lorton and Cato met as software engineering students at Southern Polytechnic State University, now Kennesaw State University, in the 1990s. They became friends instantly and have been a team ever since.
“We realized we both had a maniacal passion for software engineering before we even started college,” said Lorton.
Cato added, “Our minds were always just wired to automatically think, ‘how can I use science and technology to solve a problem?’”
Motion capture technology uses reflective markers to capture an actor’s movement and translates it to a computer or a CGI character. The men’s careers in motion capture software programming began in video game production in the early 1990s, and they say video games used to be their “bread and butter.” But they recognized early on the potential that motion capture could have in films.
While the gifted duo has worked on many films, including “Polar Express,” “Lord of the Rings,” and “The Incredible Hulk,” the “Avatar” films are their biggest labors of love. Their talent in the development of the motion-capture system, now used to help create the world of Pandora in “Avatar,” earned them Academy Awards in 2005 for Technical Achievement. A picture from that award ceremony standing alongside actress Scarlett Johansson remains a favorite.
In 2017, when writer and producer James Cameron started production…
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