Justin Thorn

Lately you can’t watch anything on TV or visit many websites without being blasted with some type of ad or trailer for the movie Avatar. In fact I have mostly ignored all the hype and noise surrounding this movie since I first saw the trailer last summer. I remember thinking to myself in the theater “here we go again. another CGI action fest”. The only thing that made it stand out a little was its release date of Christmas instead of summer when most of these type films are released. I was also confused because I first thought this movie Avatar was somehow related to the Japanese anime series by the same name. After seeing more trailers that theory never matched up. Finally, last week I broke down and decided to do more research. The results of which I will share with you now.

This movie was written and directed by James Cameron. This man is one of the most successful filmmakers of our generation. Every film he has produced has been a commercial blockbuster and every film has introduced cutting edge technology to offer ground breaking effects. Think back to Terminator 2 with its use of morphing technology or the epic recreation of the Titanic crew using simulated digital crowds. This man knows how to push the boundaries of film making and continues to do so. In fact the storyline of Avatar was written by James Cameron nearly 15 years ago but he realized the technology did not yet exist to properly convey this world he imagined on film. Fast forward to today and the power of the 3D technology now exists. $350 million dollars later and Avatar is ready to be viewed by audiences around the world.

Where did all that money go? Cameron himself helped create what is called “performance capture” technology. All special effects films today simply capture an actors motions to help animate a digital characters skeleton. They are placed in a green screen environment and must fake or imagine what is not there until the finished film is rendered. This tends to create a disconnect between the CGI characters and real human characters on screen. Cameron’s new system uses a personal camera on each actor capturing their facial expressions which are used to exactly match the facial expressions of their CGI character. All of this is done while simultaneously capturing the motion of the actors for animation purposes and their voice acting. The actors all have LCD screens showing themselves in the computer generated world as they are acting in real-time. This type of thing has never been done before in filmmaking and it is one of the main things that makes Avatar so special.

If your interested in seeing some of the behind the scenes footage you can check out this video.

For an in depth review of the movie I highly recommend you watch this segment from the latest episode of Revision3’s Totally Rad Show. They go into much more detail than I can. Watching this video is what finally changed my mind and made me decide going to see Avatar was worth my time. They even call it a “cinematic historical event” much like Star Wars was when it first released in theaters in the late 70s. Expect my review of the film to come later tonight after watching Avatar. That is assuming I can get tickets to the show before it sells out. It currently has 82% rating on RottenTomatoes. UPDATE: Here is my full review.