James Cameron's "Avatar"

[rockchisler]

I didnt know that this was coming out this year, I thought it wouldnt be here till 2010 at the earliest, guess not. Looking forward to this film. $300 miliion dollar budget..WOW

Here is the old trailer for it. Not sure if its legit or Not but the credits are right at the end so it may be legit.

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[HealyMonster]

re: James Cameron's "Avatar"

looks interesting, havent heard anything about it till now. You say its coming out this summer?

[aholbert32]

re: James Cameron's "Avatar"

Its a fake. A well done fake but a fake. Avatar is coming out in summer 2010.

[BigRed]

re: James Cameron's "Avatar"

Its a fake. A well done fake but a fake. Avatar is coming out in summer 2010.

IMDB says December 2009. And more specifically, the 18th.

[aholbert32]

re: James Cameron's "Avatar"

IMDB says December 2009. And more specifically, the 18th.

Hmm. Ive heard 2010 everywhere else. I stand corrected. The trailer has Summer 2009 so I still its a fact.

[Kashanova]

re: James Cameron's "Avatar"

For some reason I thought this was the Avatar from the Ultima games.

[marshallfever]

re: James Cameron's "Avatar"

Is that an actual real offical trailer? Looked sort of underwhelming. However this movie has potential. I want to see it.

[HealyMonster]

re: James Cameron's "Avatar"

i think they said it was a fake trailer. with that being said, is the premise the same as in that trailer?

[youvalss]

re: James Cameron's "Avatar"

LOL at first I thought the headline was saying Kirk Camerons "Avatar" (don't know why), and I was thinking: "Is this guy still on the movies/TV world?" Then I saw it's "James" and everything become clearer.

[Ewing]

James Cameron's Avatar

The story of Avatar is as follows:

Avatar is set during the 22nd century on a small moon called Pandora, which orbits a gas giant, and is inhabited by the tribal Na'vi, ten foot blue humanoids that are peaceful unless attacked. Humans cannot breathe Pandoran air, so they genetically engineer human/Na'vi hybrids known as Avatars that can be controlled via a mental link. A paralyzed Marine named Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) volunteers to exist as an Avatar on Pandora, falling in love with a Na'vi princess and becoming caught up in the conflict between her people and the human military that is consuming their world.

While that may seem like good but not great story, the production and development are the stuff of legend.

In 1995, director James Cameron wrote an 80-page scriptment for Avatar. Cameron said his inspiration was "every single science fiction book I read as a kid", and that he was particularly striving to update the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter series. Cameron saw his story as being about how advanced civilizations supplant indigenous cultures, in either actively genocidal or more unpremeditated ways, and was influenced by the story of Pocahontas. In Avatar, humanity extends that practice to entire planets. In August 1996, Cameron announced that after completing Titanic, he would film Avatar, which would make use of "synthetic", or computer-generated, actors. The project would cost $100 million and involve at least six actors in leading roles "who appear to be real but do not exist in the physical world". Special effects house Digital Domain, with whom Cameron has a partnership, joined the project, which was supposed to begin production in the summer of 1997. However, that was not to be.

In June 2005, director Cameron was announced to be working on a project tentatively titled "Project 880", concurrently with another project, Battle Angel. By December, Cameron said that he planned to film Battle Angel first for a summer 2007 release, and to film Project 880 for a 2009 release. In February 2006, Cameron said he had switched goals for the two film projects – Project 880 was now scheduled for 2007 and Battle Angel for 2009. He indicated that the release of Project 880 would possibly be delayed until 2008. Later that February, Cameron revealed that Project 880 was "a retooled version of Avatar", a film that he had tried to make years earlier, citing the technological advances in the creation of the computer-generated characters Gollum, King Kong and Davy Jones Cameron had chosen Avatar over Battle Angel after completing a five-day camera test in the previous year.

Cameron's early scriptment for Avatar had circulated on the Internet for years. When the project was re-announced, copies were subsequently removed from websites. In June 2006, Cameron said that if Avatar was successful, he hoped to make two sequels to the film.

From January to April 2006, Cameron worked on the script. Working with Paul Frommer, linguist and Director of the Center for Management Communication at USC, he developed a whole language and culture for the Na'vi, the indigenous race on Pandora. In July, Cameron announced that he would film Avatar for a summer 2008 release and planned to begin principal photography with an established cast by February 2007. The following August, the visual effects studio Weta Digital signed on to help Cameron produce Avatar. Stan Winston, who had collaborated with Cameron in the past, joined Avatar to help with the film's designs. In September 2006, Cameron was announced to be using his own Reality Camera System to film in 3-D. The system would use two high-definition cameras in a single camera body to create depth perception.

In December 2006, Cameron explained that the delay in producing the film since the 1990s had been to wait until the technology necessary to create his project was advanced enough. The director planned to create photo-realistic computer-generated characters by using motion capture animation technology, on which he had been doing work for the past 14 months. Unlike previous performance capture systems, where the digital environment is added after the actors' motions have been captured, Cameron's new virtual camera allows him to directly observe on a monitor how the actors' virtual counterparts interact with the movie's digital world in real time and adjust and direct the scenes just as if shooting live action; "It’s like a big, powerful game engine. 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." Cameron planned to continue developing the special effects for Avatar, which he hoped would be released in summer 2009. He also gave directors Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson a chance to test the new technology. Spielberg and George Lucas were also able to visit the set to watch Cameron direct with the equipment.

Other technological innovations include a performance-capture stage, called The Volume, which is six times larger than previously used and an improved method of capturing facial expressions. The tool is a small individually made skull cap with a tiny camera attached to it, located in front of the actors' face which collects information about their facial expressions and eyes, which is then transmitted to the computers. Besides a real time virtual world, the team is also experimenting with a way of letting computer generated characters interact with real actors on a real, live-action set while shooting live action.

In January 2007, Paramount Pictures announced a live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender under M. Night Shyamalan and said that the project's name had been registered to the Motion Picture Association of America for movie title ownership, though a 20th Century Fox representative for James Cameron's Avatar indicated that the studio owned the movie title. Paramount eventually retitled its film as merely The Last Airbender. In the same month, Fox announced that the studio's Avatar would be filmed in 3D with 24 frames per second. Cameron described the film as a hybrid with a full live-action shoot in combination with computer-generated characters and live environments. "Ideally at the end of the day the audience has no idea which they’re looking at," Cameron said. The director indicated that he had already worked four months on nonprincipal scenes for the film. Principal photography began in April 2008, and was done around parts of Los Angeles as well as New Zealand. The live action is shot with the proprietary Fusion digital 3-D camera system developed by Cameron and Vince Pace. According to Cameron, the film will be composed of 60% computer-generated elements and 40% live action, as well as traditional miniatures. The performance-capture photography would last 31 days at the Hughes Aircraft stage in Playa Vista, Los Angeles, California. In October, Cameron was scheduled to shoot live-action in New Zealand for another 31 days.

To create the human mining colony on Pandora, production designers visited the Noble Clyde Boudreaux drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico during June 2007. They photographed, measured and filmed every aspect of the rig, which will be replicated on-screen with photorealistic CGI. Around 1000 people worked on the production.

Yesterday, footage of the film was shown for the very first time to the public. Which you can read all about here along with any other news concerning the movie:

http://marketsaw.blogspot.com/search/label/Avatar

This may all seem like a long read so let me sum it up.

This is the first feature film by James Cameron in twelve years. This will be the final credit for the late Stan Winston, the greatest special effects architect of all-time. It has the largest budget in the history of cinema at a whopping 300 million dollars. Cameron has created a brand new visual style with the use of 3D projection, high definition and the absolutely best computer effects money can buy. The public reaction to the recently shown footage has been absolutely astounding. Journalists are saying they've never seen anything like this and some have actually said they couldn't tell the difference between CGI and real people.

I offer one picture that a man from the expo was able to capture. This is the only known photo of any finished moment in the movie.



That was taken off of a cell phone and it still looks absolutely incredible. Get ready. This going to be the greatest visual experience of your lifetime.

[trobinson97]

Re: James Cameron's Avatar

http://www.operationsports.com/forum...ns-avatar.html

[Sandman42]

Re: James Cameron's Avatar

Merged this thread with the old one.

[SuperBowlNachos]

Re: James Cameron's Avatar

http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/06/23/early-buzz-24-minutes-of-james-camerons-avatar-screened/

[CMH]

Re: James Cameron's Avatar

It is now my mission to not die before this film is released.

I'm thinking Cameron once thought the same thing.

[sven]

Re: James Cameron's Avatar

Sounds boring.