'Avatar Friday’: the day film-making may — or may not — change forever
Murad Ahmed, Technology Reporter
It is the movie that could change film-making for ever. It has the power to alter your mind. Watching it will be like dreaming with your eyes open.
Blockbusters have been hyped before but never quite in the terms being used to describe Avatar, the new film by the Oscar-winning director James Cameron.
The colossal expectation and outlandish claims surrounding the project will be put to the test this week, however, when hundreds of 3-D IMAX cinemas around the world screen a 15-minute teaser of the film before its release this Christmas.
Public reaction to the trailer on Friday, dubbed Avatar Day, is likely to determine the eventual success of the film, made by the director of Titanic and the Terminator series.
More than 20 minutes of footage from the sci-fi spectacular was made available to fans last month at the Comic-Con International convention in San Diego, California.
After the preview, directors lined up to describe it as “the future”. Excited reviewers said that they could not stop dreaming about it and that it was as though they had just taken a highly addictive drug that had left their mind yearning for more. Neurologists at the screening wondered if the movie had activated parts of the brain that were previously untouched by conventional, two-dimensional films. :shock:
For many it confirmed the rumours. Avatar would be an immense leap forward for film — the equivalent of the first movie with sound or in Technicolor.
“It comes from a director whose last dramatic feature was Titanic, and that broke new ground,” said Jack Warner, of Screen International, the film industry magazine. “He also did it with the Terminator movies. This is what he does. He spent years developing the technology to match his vision.”
But sceptics argue that the importance of Avatar to film studios has less to do with its creativity and more to do with the fact that 3-D movies are hard to copy and therefore, inevitably, attractive to an industry ravaged by online piracy. 8)
Many in Hollywood hope that the Avatar 3-D experience could not only change cinema but save it.
The film is also being met with high expectations because it has been such a long time in coming. The concept was first conceived by Cameron 14 years ago, just before Titanic became a critical and commercial hit.
Cameron seems keen to distance himself from the wilder rumours surrounding the film, telling reporters: “Whatever they think it’s going to be, it’s probably not.” :?
Avatar follows Jake, a human soldier who becomes disabled during combat on Earth. In order to join the “Avatar programme”, which will give him a healthy body to inhabit, he travels to the distant planet of Pandora, a rainforest-like world covered in alien life forms.
Cameron helped to develop the advanced “fusion camera system 3-D technology” used to shoot the film. The system uses a combination of high-definition 3-D cameras alongside special, motion-capture techniques that can pick up high levels of detail, including almost all of an actor’s facial expressions.
Ten UK cinemas every week are reportedly upgrading to the digital projection systems necessary to screen the film.
Viewers will still need 3-D glasses to watch Avatar but the coloured spectacles of the past have given way to a pair of “polarised” glasses that look more like sleek sunglasses.
“All the other 3-D stuff that is kicking around right now seems to be quite gimmicky, where people point at the camera and all that ridiculous stuff,” said Daniel Bettridge, a British fan who saw the Avatar preview at Comic-Con.
“[In Avatar], whether it was a case of plants just drifting into the foreground and looking really good or heading through this alien landscape, it felt as if you were not just watching something but immersed within it. You felt as if it surrounded you.”
Analysts warned that the film represented a big gamble on the part of Twentieth Century Fox, which is part-owned by News Corporation, the parent company of The Times.
Movies in 3-D have been around since the 1950s but audiences and film-makers still appear to prefer the flat canvas of a 2-D screen.
The studio has reportedly invested more than $200 million (£123 million) on the project and needs it to succeed. While that price is around the same amount that it cost to make Titanic, that film went on to be the highest-grossing movie of all time.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/u ... 799610.ece