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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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 unproven technology, blue protagonists with tails...
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...
...floor, forcing the cast to walk gingerly. When Zoe Saldana, who plays Jake's Na'vi love interest Neytiri, was "riding" a flying creature, she clung to a giant gray hobbyhorse rocked on a gimbal by grips. For scenes that combined live action with CG, Cameron used a new tool called a Simulcam, which allowed him to see actors 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...
...quietly revaluing its currency at a rate of 100 to 1. The move is widely believed to be an attempt to crack down on private businesses that operate outside the government's control. North Koreans will be able to exchange the equivalent of $40 in old currency for the new bills; anything over that will be lost. North Korea has conducted four previous currency exchanges, each one highly publicized. This time the government has remained tight-lipped. Pyongyang watchers report protests against the revaluation...
...Meet the New Boss (Maybe...