Avatar Live happened today and if you’re wondering what that means then here’s the short version: James Cameron, Zoe Saldana, and Sam Worthington sat around with an MTV peon and took carefully crafted questions designed to help them promote the film. The whole thing was streamed live online and in theory, they took questions from fans as well. In practice it turned out to be 5 or 6 questions from fans, all carefully chosen to put Avatar and its originality in the best possible light. What, you were expecting something else?

But one really surprising thing did come out of it. During the course of the interview they showed clips from the movie’s pre-production in which Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana dressed up like aborigines and went running around Hawaii half-naked acting out their scenes without all the motion capture gobbledy gook they’d be saddled with once the thing started filming all green screen in the studio.

The picture below is a look at them in action. For anyone who’s complained that Avatar contains too much animation, well here’s the alternative. I think we’re better off with blue, cartoon aliens: