Word: avatars
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Bringing Pandora to Life Despite Cameron's success with Titanic - the highest-grossing movie of all time and winner of a record-tying 11 Oscars - Avatar was not an easy sell to his home studio, 20th Century Fox. Since 1997, Cameron had been largely absent from the Hollywood scene, riding in submersibles, shooting documentaries and building new filmmaking toys. In 2005, Fox funded a $10 million, 5-min. prototype for the movie, but when Cameron delivered a 153-page draft of the script months later, the studio balked. Here was an ambitious project with a lot of risky elements, including...
...director's last movie had involved creating the largest and most meticulously detailed set ever made: a scale replica of the Titanic. By contrast, Avatar's performance-capture soundstage, which is called the volume, looked like a Saturday Night Live skit about postmodern theater. Instead of sets, gray-painted polygons and the occasional tree were moved around to create topography. For the computer-generated (CG) scenes, which make up about 60% of the finished film, the cast wore clingy Lycra bodysuits covered in markers that were recognized by the 102 cameras on the warehouse ceiling. They donned skullcaps rigged with...
With more than 2,500 special-effects shots, the bulk of the man-hours on Avatar were spent not on a stage but in a dark viewing room in Los Angeles, in teleconferences with collaborating artists from Peter Jackson's Weta Digital studio in Wellington, New Zealand. The real world was being used to inform the fictional one: an energy map of the Pandoran forest was modeled on rat neurons; hours were spent getting alien sap to drip precisely right. (See the 10 worst video game movies...
...playing in exotic CG surroundings in real time. Cameron's goal was to shoot as if he were filming a documentary on another planet. It was the kind of filmmaking environment that required both imagination and patience. A crew member wrote a set catchphrase on a whiteboard: "It's Avatar, dude, nothing works the first time...
...Avatar Onscreen Audiences got their first look at Avatar footage in July at San Diego's Comic-Con. When the trailer went online on Aug. 21, demand was instantaneous, quickly making it the most downloaded trailer at Apple.com The Avatar footage triggered a record 4 million streams in its first day. But the reaction wasn't all glowing. Some commenters likened the Na'vi to George Lucas' reviled CG character Jar Jar Binks, others to the '80s TV cartoon Thundercats. Those who saw the footage in theaters (it screened in select IMAX locations) were considerably more impressed, but the initial...