STORY:

Set 200 years into the future Avatar follows the story of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) an injured war veteran who reluctantly ends up on Pandora, a moon orbiting a giant gas planet.

  Pandora has a lush, tropical rain forest, is rich in biodiversity and is inhabited by the Na’vi, a humanoid race with their own unique language and culture.

Jim Gianopulos

  Trouble arises when human colonists try and exploit the indigenous tribe, supervised by Selfridge a ruthless man who will stop at nothing to gain a foothold into the new world. A rift between races ensues with Jake eventually crossing over to the indigenous side, falling in love with
Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) in the process and leading the Na’vi in an epic
battle for survival.

 

“In this film the human technology in the future is capable of injecting a human's intelligence into a remotely located body, a biological body.
It's not an avatar in the sense of just existing as ones and zeroes in cyberspace. It's actually a physical body. The lead character, Jake has his human existence and his avatar existence.” - James Cameron

 

It has taken more than ten years for Cameron to realise his vision for Avatar. The original script was written to be his follow up to Titanic but as with most of Cameron’s movies the technology wasn’t up to scratch, so the project got shelved and Cameron moved on to exploration and documentary film making. Meanwhile, since the release of Titanic computer generated special effects rapidly improved. Works on such movies as Lord of The Rings by WETA, Pirates of the Caribbean 2 by ILM and the recent Star Wars Trilogy help pushed the development of synthetic beings, or computer generated characters. This development, especially from WETA, has given Cameron his opportunity to delve in, raise the bar and produce the stunning range of effects needed to turn Avatar into the epic movie he envisions.

  Avatar left the radar and went underground into a world of movie legend (was one of Empire Magazines greatest unmade movies), after Titanic Cameron decided the technology wasn’t ready and that a change of direction was needed. Armed with a massive payoff from Titanic, Cameron started his ten year love affair with exploration and deep sea diving. All the while he kept on developing various 3D camera systems for use with his documentaries and eventual features.

Working alongside his brother Mike Cameron of Dark Matter, Jim has taken the development of digital camera systems to a new level. The Cameron brothers have long since worked together (Mike can be seen in The Abyss with a crab crawling out of his mouth) developing film making techniques up-to and including Avatar.

  Jim has also been dedicated to improving computer generated photo-realism, something that he said is to be vital for the believability of Avatar. Working alongside 150 animators at WETA and using the hardware designed by himself and Vince Pace, Cameron has a lot of work ahead
of him:

  “I’ll be done in terms of a cut of the picture by November of this year. And then the rest of the time after that, which is going to be like a year and a half is just going to be me working with the effects guys day in and day out to get the visual calibre up to the highest level.”

  Cameron’s vision of Avatar has meant that a whole planet has had to be designed: “We're creating an entire world, a complete ecosystem of phantasmagorical plants and creatures, and a native people with a rich culture and language.”

  “The creatures are all animated, you have the Na’vis as the kind of indigenous peoples are going to be played by actors and their performances will be baked in by the performance capture process.”

  Performance capture is a technique most recently used on films such as Monster House, Polar Express and Pirates of the Caribbean 2. It differs from Motion Capture (a previous technique used for most character CGI) due to the interactive nature of the performance. Put simply, performance capture sees a whole lot more, body movements, facial expressions and hand gestures all at the same time.  What Cameron has managed to do in the last couple of years is develop a system that would enable him to see in real time the performance of the actors whilst in their CG environment. This revolutionary approach lets Cameron direct scenes with CG characters just as he would with a full live action picture.

“We have these flying creatures called Banshees, and we’ve been trying performance capture with the Banshees and it has been working, ya know, how they land, how they crash, how they get shot”

  Once the performances have been shot and a rough edit taken place, WETA Digital, Peter Jackson effects company in New Zealand will spend the next 18 months creating the photo realistic characters and the world of Pandora alongside Cameron.

  To work in conjunction with the performance capture system Cameron and Vince Pace designed the Fusion Digital 3D Camera System, the highest quality and most sophisticated 3D system available. Unlike old fashioned 3D there is no red and blue glasses, the action is shot on two high definition digital cameras set 2.5 inches apart that can change angle in direct relation to each other, mimicking the human eyes that move inwards when an object gets closer. The increased depth perception, an increase in frame rates, a clearer digital picture and new glasses mean the 3D world that will be created wont be headache inducing and will completely engross the audience, even more so than Jim’s IMAX work.

  The movie will be shot in LA and in New Zealand (more than likely Peter Jackson’s studios in Miramar) starting April. However with so much effects work to be done we will have to wait until Showest 2008 for a sneak preview, but one thing is for sure, it will worth the wait.

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The Independent 2006:

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