TechRepublic editors review
Avatar 3D's merits
Mary Weilage | Excerpt:
techrepublic.com
Mark Kaelin: First, let me say, the 3D was very well done. I could tell thousands of hours by some very creative people were put into the making of the movie.
The artistic ability of those involved was unquestionable. However, with that being said, I found the 3D aspect of Avatar to be a complete and totally unnecessary distraction. From my perspective, the 3D was just plain annoying.
In one scene, there were little firefly-like things floating around, and my reaction was to brush them away — they interfered and obscured what was taking place on the screen. I’m sure the intention was to enhance the “magic” of the scene, but all I remember is wishing the stupid bugs would go away. I actually thought about a steamy summer evening on the patio swatting away the mosquitoes.
Sonja Thompson: As I stated in my introduction, I’ve always been a fan of 3D, and so Avatar didn’t disappoint in this area; in fact, the 3D experience just keeps getting better and better. For example, we used to have to wear those flimsy glasses with one red and one green lens.
Blockbuster 'Avatar' to
accelerate 3D revolution
By Rob Woollard | Source:
smh.com
The runaway success of science fiction blockbuster "Avatar" will accelerate the 3D movie revolution, which has already powered Hollywood to a record year at the box office, analysts say. James Cameron's futuristic fantasy is on course to become the highest-grossing movie of all time after smashing the one-billion-dollar barrier in only three weeks over the weekend.
The film, which has a reported budget of between 300 and 500 million US dollars, has been hailed as a landmark in movie history and its impact will be felt across the industry, experts say. "The ramifications of 'Avatar's' performance are huge," said Jeff Bock, chief analyst with box office tracking firm Exhibitor Relations. "Ripple effects are going to occur fast and furiously."
Bock said the stellar success of "Avatar," which is already the fourth highest-grossing movie in history, would persuade other studios that big budget 3D films represented an attractive investment.
"The gains far outweigh the risks right now and if you can have someone like James Cameron helming your 3D film, then you're okay to spend 300 to 500 million US dollars on your film because you're going to get your money back and then some," he added.
Eyes on Avatar as an
industry seeks renewal
By Matthew Garrahan | Excerpt:
ft.com
Avatar is the first big-budget live-action release to be shot in 3D, which many in the industry are betting represents the future of filmmaking. Such 3D films tend to perform better at the box office because exhibitors and cinema chains can charge a premium price.
Thanks to a new generation of glasses and projection systems, audiences have, to date, been willing to pay more for the 3D experience. "A 3D screen produces roughly two-and-a-half times the revenue of a comparable 2D screen," says Jim Gianopulos, co-chairman and chief executive of Fox Filmed Entertainment, the studio behind Avatar.
Avatar is the first live action 3D film to go on wide release and was made by the director of Titanic , the biggest grossing film.
Aware that the film could become a huge hit, cinema chains have used its imminent release as a catalyst to convert their screens to the new format. "People were expecting a ramp up [in the number of 3D screens] but nothing as dramatic as what took place," says Mr Gianopulos.
Immersive technology in
James Cameron’s latest caper “Avatar”
Excerpt:
mb.com.ph
Avatar will make people truly experience something, one more layer of the suspension of disbelief will be removed. All the syn-thespians are photo-realistic. Now that we’ve discovered CG characters in 3D look more real than 2D.
Your brain is cued – it’s a real thing not a picture – and discounting the part of (the) image that makes it look fake,” says James Cameron at the Microsoft Advance ’08 conference.
A year after Cameron made the statement, “Avatar” is now ready to reel in Phil. theaters come December 17 (Thursday).
The day is set for all fans, film critics and filmmakers to finally assess the technology Cameron has so passionately talked about the past few years.
Is James Cameron's $500m
3D blockbuster Avatar set to
revolutionise cinema?
By Rob Waugh
Excerpt:
mailonsunday.co.uk
Titanic director James Cameron has a button that makes him 18ft tall. He simply shouts across to a technician, and he's suddenly towering over the actors, shooting down at them from an angle that would have previously been impossible without a crane or helicopter.
Another button press, and he's a mere 12ft; press again, and he's tiny, dwarfed by the actors around him. The actors aren't really there, of course. Cameron is holding a 'virtual camera' in his hands - a square monitor screen - and pacing around an empty set, taking new shots.
But when he looks through the camera screen, the stars of Avatar, Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana, can be seen there, morphed into Na'vi, the blue deer-like creatures who populate the world of Pandora.
Looking through the screen, Cameron can walk around his actors and shoot from any angle. The actual performances took place months ago, and were captured on Cameron-designed 3D cameras, which stored the actors as a full-3D video inside a 68-terabyte computer in a 'digital asset management system'.
Avatar Breaks IMAX’s
Wide Release Record
By Krystal Clark
Source:
screencrave.com
Following in the footsteps of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and The Dark Knight, James Cameron’s Avatar will debut in both conventional and IMAX theaters when its released this Friday, December 18th. The 3-D spectacle will have the widest IMAX opening ever in both domestic and international markets.
This past summer Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince popped up in 161 domestic IMAX theaters, and about 70 international. Avatar will up the ante by appearing in 178 domestic and 83 international IMAX theaters for a total of 261, making it the company’s widest release to date.
Director James Cameron feels that IMAX will allow viewers to see the film in the best possible way thanks to the sound and picture quality that the venues have to offer.
“Our goal with ‘Avatar’ is to revolutionize live-action 3D moviemaking, and it looks and sounds incredible in IMAX 3D,” said director James Cameron. “The larger field of view and powerful surround sound of an IMAX theater will immerse the audience in a way that cannot be experienced anywhere else.”
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Five Innovations in James Cameron’s Avatar
By Peter Sciretta | Source: slashfilm.com
Performance Capture Workflow: A lot of the film was captured using a performance capture technique similar to that of which Robert Zemeckis filmed Beowulf. So Cameron developed a virtual camera which will allow his to point it at his actors and see them as their computer generated characters in real time.
Simulcam: A camera set-up which allows them to follow or monitor a virtual character which was captured in performance capture into a live action environment in real-time. It also allows them to see what a virtual backgrounds will look like in a live-action shot. I know that Steven Spielberg had a set-up like this on A.I., but I think it only showed him wireframes of buildings, and was very glitchy.
Facial Capture Head Rig: The actors in performance capture suits also wear a camera rig on their heads that takes digital shots of the actor’s face. This allows the computer generated character to have 100% facial movement, even in the real time performance capture workflow mentioned above.
Facial Performance Replacement: In traditional filmmaking they use ADR (or additional Dialogue Replacement) when filmmakers need a cleaner take of the actor’s dialogue, or need to fudge in a new line. But with a traditional film, you really need to trick a shot to make it work.
The lips don’t always match up, and sometimes, if you’providing an entirely new line of dialogue, filmmakers usually resort to a wide shot or a behind the head shot, so that you can’t see the lips of the actor on screen. Since 60% of Avatar is performance capture, he has designed a way to insert a new facial scan/dialogue capture on an existing performance.
Fusion 3-D Camera System: The Fusion 3-D camera system was co-developed by James Cameron and and Vince Pace. The rig uses two Sony HDCF950 HD cameras to create stereoscopic 3-D. Cameron first used the system on his 2003 IMAX film Ghosts of the Abyss.
It has since been used by Robert Rodriguez on Spy Kids 3-D and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, and most recently on Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert and Journey to the Center of the Earth. But I’m not exactly sure what improvements Cameron made to the rig over the last five years.
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Source:
thetechjournal.com
It may seem an unlikely idea, but there are those who suggest that the technology invented for the hit James Cameron film, ‘Avatar,’ may show us what the future of virtual worlds looks like. Since the release of his massive hit “Avatar,” director James Cameron has gotten plenty of deserved attention for his filmmaking innovations, having invented a camera system that captured live footage of his actors and integrated it immediately into fleshed-out scenes from his fictional world of Pandora.
But movies may not be the only medium Cameron’s innovation is pushing toward the future. In fact, the technology he and his visual effects partners built for the record breaking film may also provide our first real glimpse of the future of 3D virtual worlds. Today’s virtual worlds have attracted millions of users, significant venture capital and sometimes impressive revenues.
But some experts think it’s a no-brainer that augmented reality tools like Cameron used to turn “Avatar” into history’s highest-grossing film could soon be the core of what millions of people experience in 3D virtual worlds that until now, we’ve only been able to dream about. Today, the term “virtual world” means a lot of things to a lot of people. To many, it means 2D online social games like Gaia Online or Club Penguin. To some, it means large-scale massively-multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft. And to others, it’s open-ended 3D experiences like Second Life.
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Avatar Director James Cameron Calls 3-D 'A Whole New Way To Paint, A Whole New Set Of Colors'
By Adam Rosenberg | Source:
mtv.com
Many labels have been applied to James Cameron's 2009 smash "Avatar" since even before it hit theaters, but few have been more ubiquitous than "game-changer." The sci-fi epic is notable for being conceived and written from the ground up to play as a 3-D release. Many in the industry believed that the release of "Avatar" would herald a newfound focus on the tech, something that had already been picking up steam in the months leading to the December 18 release.
When Cameron stopped by earlier this week to chat with MTV's Josh Horowitz on a variety of topics, it was inevitable that 3-D would come up, and it's perceived game-changing influence on the business of Hollywood. "Yeah... yeah, blame me for that," he said with a grin. Josh went on to list a number of examples, including the coming "Clash of the Titans" conversion, the Grammys-- and Cameron stopped him there.
"The Grammys did it wrong," he said, "with the [need for] red and blue [glasses]. Everybody took the glasses off and said 'This isn't like the Avatar 3-D!'" To him, it's a sign that moviegoers in general are developing a more refined palate for tech advancements such as this. "There is an evolution, people are now starting to not accept inferior forms, which is good. But it's typical of Hollywood getting it wrong," Cameron explained.
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By Kurt Raether | Source:
uwmpost.com
William Friese-Greene first filed the patent for the three-dimensional process in 1894. No, that’s not a typo; 3D film has been around for over 100 years. He developed a system that used a stereoscope to combine two images into one. The basic process remains the same to this very day, and in recent discussion about the future of the moving image, 3D has dominated the landscape. The question seems to be whether 3D is the next step in film and video, or if it just another gimmick to get more technology off the shelves and into our homes. To paraphrase: “Didn’t I just buy an HD TV?”
The answer can be found by simply looking at trends. In the last few years, 3D movies have seen a resurgence, especially in children’s fare. 2004’s The Polar Express was one of the first, followed by films like Monster House and Meet the Robinsons. In 2007, Beowulf bucked the kid stuff, billing itself as one of the first serious 3D films aimed at an adult audience. 2009, however, takes the cake in the recent 3D saturation with a total of twelve mainstream Hollywood films jutted out at audiences last year.
Even more are in the works for 2010, including Toy Story 3D and the Burton-Depp love fest of Alice in Wonderland. And if the recent box office receipts of a certain James Cameron movie are any indication, the trend may be here to stay. Avatar is a film that, despite its shortcomings, has captured the lens-covered eyes of the world. Cameron has created a giant blue environment to which people cannot wait to escape. And, partially due to the giant marketing blitz that accompanied its release, everyone wants a piece of it.
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The Cameron effect
By Oliver Good | Excerpt:
thenational.ae
When an audience at the Dubai International Film Festival today becomes one of the first in the world to don 3D specs and watch James Cameron’s Avatar, a number of things could happen. If the pre-release hype and any number of early reviews are to be trusted, they will leave the screening having seen something that will change cinema forever.
Alternatively, they will have sat through the most expensive vanity project in film history; a two-and-a-half-hour-long special-effects marathon with only the power, according to one report, to induce mass vomiting. The science-fiction epic, which has reportedly been in the works for 14 years, takes place on the mythical world of Pandora, a lush, jungle-covered moon.
It focuses on a conflict between humans, who are seeking to benefit from Pandora’s natural resources, and the Na’vi, the race of tall blue aliens who have featured prominently in the film’s promotional campaign. If the trailer is anything to go by, expect giant robots and helicopter gunships battling spear-throwing aliens on beast back. The buzz from the production company Fox is that Avatar represents a quantum leap for special effects, akin to the likes of King Kong, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Jurassic Park.
But many fear that, due to its heavy reliance on digital effects, Avatar is just as likely to become the next Phantom Menace. Despite these early reservations, the small number of reviews that have emerged in the past few days have been largely positive. The trade paper Variety called Cameron’s new world “a place worth visiting” and The Hollywood Reporter refered to the “jaw-dropping wonder” of Avatar. “Special effects have become more than just embellishments within films, now they seem to be the driving force behind the way films are conceived and marketed,” says Simon Hunter, the president of the New York Film Academy, Abu Dhabi.
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Alternate World, Alternate Technology
By John Anderson | Excerpt:
nytimes.com
“WELCOME to Avatar.” The director James Cameron had materialized, as if by digital magic, before an early screening audience here of his latest blockbuster-in-waiting. But it’s not quite clear what the director was inviting them into this day in early December. The little $230 million picture he had just finished? The “world” created by his production’s advanced digital techniques?
The “shameless engine of commerciality” he has not so jokingly claimed to have constructed? Whichever “Avatar” Mr. Cameron had in mind, a lot of people’s holiday happiness, and profit, rest upon it. And the debut did not come without a hiccup.
The houselights dimmed. The 20th Century Fox logo appeared. Trumpets blared. But before the first frame of this futuristic, sci-fi, eco-pacifist space fable could make an impression, the houselights rose. “That was a bit shorter than you expected,” Mr. Cameron called out, to polite laughter. “There’s a problem in the projection room.” Fearing for the life of the projectionist, the audience watched Mr. Cameron, white-maned, a little paunchy these days and wearing his standard blue button-down, disappear. Darkness fell, and “Avatar” resurfaced.
This time the audience got to see what four years of labor and state-of-the-art visual effects look like. The next day Mr. Cameron was mock-mysterious during an interview at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. “Nobody knows,” he said when asked what went wrong with the film. “It shut off the computer and turned it back on. It fixes itself, and we don’t know why. I always hate that answer. I always want to know why.” Sounding like the kid who took Dad’s watch apart to see why it ticked, Mr. Cameron has long been a director associated with technology as much as dramaturgy.
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The Gimmicks That Changed Cinema
James Cameron promises Avatar will be the next step in a fully-immersive, 3-D movie experience -- but will it have the impact of these?
By Michael Adams | Excerpt:
rottentomatoes.com
James Cameron's Avatar is almost here, and if it's anything like the director's been promising -- a new way to experience immersive 3-D movies, whatever that means -- then the industry could be about to enter a new phase of technology.
So to mark the release of the latest revolution in film technology, we took a look back -- way back -- at the ones that have come before it. In the first of our two-part series about the technological advances that changed the movie industry forever, we look at the gimmicks that are now part of the standard moviegoing experience. Tomorrow, we look at the ones that weren't so fortunate.
Color: Hand tinting of black-and-white shorts started at the birth of cinema, but it wasn't until 1906 that the first color process, the additive red-green format called Kinemacolor, was developed in the UK. The Brits can also lay claim to the world's first color feature film, with 1914's five-reel Kinemacolor melodrama The World, The Flesh and The Devil. Kinemacolor flicks had to be projected on special equipment at double speed, which was hell on prints, but, even so, hundreds of cinemas in Britain, Japan and the US installed the technology to play the film.
Sound: Motion-picture pioneers Thomas Edison and Eadweard Muybridge apparently met to discuss the prospect of synchronized sound for the movies in 1888 -- seven years before the first publicly projected films! Film with sound -- that is, projected images accompanied by music, songs or dialogue on a phonograph recording -- began in 1896 in Berlin. And it was in the same German city in 1922 that the first sound-on-film dramatic talkie, The Arsonist, was screened for the public.
3-D: Like sound and color, 3-D's conception coincided with the earliest days of film, with British cinematography pioneer William Friese Greene experimenting with stereoscopic moving images in the early 1890s. The first 3-D film presentation for a paying audience was at New York's Astor Theater in 1915, with a triple-bill program of one-reel travelogues, while the first 3-D feature, Power of Love, debuted in Los Angeles in 1922.
This is the first of a two part article, click the source link above for the complete article and the link for Part 2.
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Avatar - Gateway to a new world
James Cameron's long-awaited 3D science-fiction epic Avatar opens this month. Geoffrey Macnab recounts the Titanic director's long struggle to make it, and asks whether the film will revolutionise cinema
Excerpt:
independent.co.uk
At the Las Vegas trade event ShoWest in 2005, the film directors James Cameron, George Lucas, Robert Zemeckis, Robert Rodriguez and Randal Kleiser all appeared on stage together in 3D specs.
These titans of the US film industry were there to herald what they were confidently predicting would be the next big revolution in cinema – a revolution that might even have the transformative powers of the birth of the talkie in Hollywood in the late 1920s... namely 3D.
Nearly five years on, that revolution may at last be in sight. This month sees the release of James Cameron's Avatar, the movie that advance hype suggests is supposed to change our filmgoing experience forever. Fourteen years in the making, boasting almost 3,000 effects shots and costing (it has been claimed in some quarters) as much as $300m, the film – the publicity tells us – will take us "to a spectacular world beyond our imagination".
Avatar is being billed by Fox as "a fully immersive cinematic experience of a new kind, where the revolutionary technology invented to make the film disappears into the emotion of the characters and the sweep of the story". The film is about a wheelchair-bound human ex-marine who ventures to a faraway planet full of rich, terrifying life forms. Here, he encounters the Na'vi, a humanoid race. They live at ease with their environment and don't welcome human beings trespassing in their backyard in search of valuable minerals.
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James Cameron’s New 3-D Epic Could Change Film Forever
By Joshua Davis | Excerpt:
wired.com
Here’s James Cameron’s idea of play: scuba diving near unexploded, World War II-era depth charges in Micronesia. In the summer of 2000, he chartered an 80-foot boat and invited a group of people to dive down to a fleet of sunken Japanese battleships. He brought along Vincent Pace, an underwater camera specialist who had worked on Titanic and The Abyss. Pace, expecting to experiment with hi-def video, packed all of his gear but soon began to suspect that Cameron had something else on his mind.
They were looking over footage from a day’s dive when Cameron asked Pace a question: What would it take to build “the holy grail of cameras,” a high-definition rig that could deliver feature-film quality in both 2-D and 3-D? Pace wasn’t sure — he was no expert but knew about the cheap red-and-blue paper glasses of conventional 3-D filmmaking. They were notoriously uncomfortable, and the images could cause headaches if the projectors weren’t calibrated perfectly. Cameron believed there must be a way to do it better. What he really wanted to talk about was his vision for the next generation of cameras: maneuverable, digital, high-resolution, 3-D.
Inventing such a camera wouldn’t be easy, but Cameron said he was ready to break new ground. He mentioned a mysterious, long-gestating film project that would bring viewers to an alien planet. Cameron didn’t want to make the movie unless viewers could experience the planet viscerally, in 3-D. Since no satisfactory 3-D cameras existed, he’d have to build one. He’d brought Pace on the Pacific adventure to ask if the underwater cameraman wanted to help. His goal seemed kind of extreme, but Pace thought it sounded interesting and signed on. “Jim had a clear ambition on the dive trip,” Pace says. “It was fun, but I didn’t really know what I was getting into.”
Two months later, Cameron sent Pace a $17,000 first-class ticket from Los Angeles to Tokyo, and soon they were sitting in front of the engineers at Sony’s hi-def-camera division. Pace was there to help persuade Sony to separate the lens and image sensor from the processor on the company’s professional-grade HD camera. The bulky CPU could then be kept a cable-length away from the lens — rather than struggling with a conventional 450-pound 3-D system, a camera operator would just have to handle a 50-pound, dual-lens unit.
This highlight is the first of a three part series of articles from wired.com. Click on the link above for the full part one article, and click these titles for part two and three - 5 Steps to Avatar: Reinventing Moviemaking and Inventing Effects to Create the Avatar Universe - both by Frank Rose.
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The technological secrets of James Cameron's new film Avatar
How the director has taken 3D film technology to the next level in his new blockbuster
By Bobbie Johnson | Excerpt:
guardian.co.uk
In real life, we see images in three dimensions because our left and right eyes see slightly different images that, when combined by the brain, deliver a picture that has depth. In old-fashioned 3D cinematography – the sort where your glasses had red and green coloured lenses – a pair of closely-aligned images with different tints gave the impression of depth by fooling the eyes.
But modern 3D films have developed new techniques to drag them out of their B-movie past, and Avatar takes things a step further by using both computer generated imagery and advanced stereoscopic filming methods to create the illusion of reality. So far, most successful 3D movies have been entirely animated – and Cameron, too, has used computer generated images to build his virtual world. Avatar's footage is built from around 70% CGI, including the female lead, a blue alien played by Star Trek's Zoe Saldana.
As a result, the cast donned motion-capture suits – essentially, leotards covered in sensors that feed the movements of the body back to a bank of computers – and acted out their scenes on a "performance capture" stage six times bigger than anything used in Hollywood before. Cameron also attempted to crank up the realism by improving the way the suits captured the actors' facial expressions, using a skull cap with a camera enhancement that closely monitored their eyes, mouth and other small movements.
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