Word: films
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...hopes its immersive special effects spark a big-screen renaissance. Fans crave the next Star Wars. It's a heavy burden, even for a man who seems to enjoy doing only things that are hard. Cameron first laid out his vision for the technology he would use in the film in a digital manifesto in the early 1990s; he then labored to perfect it over the course of a decade and a half, creating cameras that let him peer into virtual worlds and pushing for the industry's adoption of a digital 3-D format. The result...
...draft of the script months later, the studio balked. Here was an ambitious project with a lot of risky elements, including unproven technology, blue protagonists with tails and a script that wasn't based on a comic book, novel or video game - making it unique for a big-budget film in its time. In September 2006, Fox formally passed on Avatar. Only after another studio (Disney) seemed poised to take it on - and after Cameron made concessions in both his script and his compensation - did Fox green-light the film. Now he just had to make...
...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 tiny cameras that imaged their faces. Thanks to software created for the film, the actors appeared on Cameron's monitor in real time as their alien...
...movies, Avatar can be watched as pure escapist entertainment or as a dire warning about humanity's current path. But here, for the first time, Cameron's future vision has not been limited by the strictures of a real-world movie set. The result is his most fantastical film, one that hews to the rules of science in its creatures and environments but not to the limitations of the physical world of props and the human body. Of course, it still needs to draw human bodies to the theater. Its trickiest special effect is yet unseen: meeting the expectations that...
ALEC BALDWIN, vowing to quit acting in 2012 because he considers his big-screen career a "complete failure," during an interview to promote his new film, It's Complicated...