Two words: Holy. Shit.

Fox has been airing this 10-minute clip from behind the scenes of James Cameron’s upcoming Avatar and Hulu did us the honor of getting it online.

Don’t be discouraged by the first half of the video. A lot of it is stuff you’ve already seen in the various other behind the scenes clips and trailers. But let yourself get about four and a half minutes into it and you’ll find some really amazing stuff. Well, if you’re a huge movie dork like me you will. We finally get a look at the enormous motion capture stage used to create all of the CG footage for the film, which you know by now is a pretty large percentage of the final product. Sure you’ve probably seen mo-cap stages before, but I promise you have never seen anything to this scale.

On top of that, never have I seen technology used the way they are using it to not only capture motion, but also to translate the facial movements and emotion onto the faces of the corresponding Na’vi. The really incredible part is seeing final renders of scenes play out side-by-side next to their actor’s mo-cap performance. It’s quite stunning.

The imaginary world that James Cameron has created is so lush and vast that I’m convinced that he doesn’t even see a sounds stage, he see Pandora. He’s created a system for his movie to be made in which it preserves the performance and emotion of the actor without doing all of it in a computer. The man has truly revolutionized the CG world with this film, and every reservation I may have had about it is officially gone. December 18th could not get here soon enough.