Item published by Phit on 1st Sep 2009. 0 Comments.
You can't hear much about Director James Cameron's upcoming movie Avatar without hearing praise for the spectacular-looking visual effects in the same breath, but modern Hollywood where it is: what makes this movie look so much better than every other effects-heavy film out there? With the most-viewed trailer debut in the history of Apple.com - by more than two million streams - the hype can't be for nothing.
Avatar follows the story of wheelchair-bound former Marine, Jake Sully, as he is selected to participate in the Avatar program, an experimental program on the planet Pandora that will allow him to walk again through the use of a genitcally engineered alien body. Enter the visually stunning world of Pandora, reportedly so jaw-dropping that viewing the world through Cameron's movie screen is almost like living there through the eyes of the natives, the Na'vi.
Sully is unwittingly thrust into a war between Human and Na'vi as he straddles the gap between being a human and being a man.
What separates Avatar from many movies, though, is no so much the plot reading as it is the actual viewing. Unwilling to stop at success - James Cameron's Titanic still sits firmly as the highest grossing movie of all time after twelve years - Avatar takes the visual cinematics of the movie process to extremes.
As Cameron's first feature length film in over a decade, Avatar uses Stereoscopic 3D cameras, designed by Director of Photography Vince Pace. The cameras were made to produce 3D in the same way the human eye does, by simultaneously filming the same scene through two slightly separated lenses. This method of rendering 3D has been used, but never before with separately moving lenses at such a close angle to each other. To further empower the new digital cameras, Cameron used the latest in CG motion capture - most widely appreciated in The Lord of the Ring's Gollum character - to digitally impose characters over his actors during filming. Unlike previous motion capture, the new virtual cameras enable viewing of physical actors in the virtual world in real time. Like live action movies, scenes can be re-shot based on what the Director sees during the shoot.
“It’s like a big, powerful game engine,” Cameron explained of the technology in an interview with the New York Times. “If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can. I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature and go through it on a 50 to 1 scale. It’s pretty exciting.”
Directed and Written by James Cameron and starring Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Michelle Rodriguez, and Zoe Saldana. Over a decade in the making, Avatar opens in theatres 18 December, 2009.
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