Roland Emmerich plans to use Avatar’s motion-capture technology for Foundation trilogy

Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012…essentially anything where the world is destroyed by an enormous overload of CGI) is planning to develop a series of films based on Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.

Asimov’s books revolve around two societies that are created at opposite ends of the galaxy, as sources of human knowledge, in an attempt to shorten a coming dark age. The dark age is predicted by a mathematician’s psychohistory, a science that allows him to predict large-scale events in the future.

Emmerich intends to shoot the films using the same methods as Avatar; filming everything using motion-capture, and then presenting it in 3D CGI. MTV Movies Blog, who have the original story, provide this quote from Emmerich:

“It’s not only the effect of 3-D, ['Avatar' has] just shown that if you do a movie in 3-D, you can ask for more money and that’s the trick.”