Avatar
James Cameron's Avatar had been in the works since the 1990s, but the director had to wait for technology to catch up with his grandiose vision of what the film was meant to be. Actors wore skull caps and motion-capture suits, acting out their scenes on a performance capture stage six times larger than anything Hollywood had ever seen. The lead VFX company, Weta Digital, employed 900 people to work on the film.
Due to the huge amount of data that had to be stored for Avatar, Microsoft devised an entirely new system specifically for the film. Each minute of final footage for the nearly three-hour-long film occupied 17.28 gigabytes of storage; it took several hours to render each individual frame of the film.