Avatar: Exclusive new trailer

[The Bosniak]

Terminator 2, Aliens (1986), Abyss, Titanic....James Cameron is a God. Everything he does is somehing that hasn't been done before, and it ages so well. All classics. Motion captrue, CGI....all him.

his new movie been a long time in the making....i hope it lives up to his usual greatness.



http://entertainment.timesonline.co....cle6893840.ece

the effect he describes can be seen right away..of things being not real yet looking and moving real, unlike typical cgi....

James Cameron gets an intense, visceral thrill from being in the vanguard of technological innovation. “It’s the same gene that makes me want to explore under the ocean, see things people haven’t seen before and bring them back with my tail wagging to show everybody,” he says.

Cameron introduced the first “motion capture” characters, in Total Recall, and the first human movements on a CGI (computer-generated imagery) character in Terminator 2; and he has again been working at the boundaries of digital technology to create the imaginary world and characters in Avatar. Cameron and his technical collaborators — in particular Weta Digital, the New Zealand-based visual-effects studio owned by Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy — were reinventing the technological wheel as they were working on the film, which took four years to make.

Although about two-thirds of Avatar has been created by a bank of computers — a virtual world — it was also filmed as a live-action shoot. The actors worked both on conventional sets and against “green screen” backgrounds, with the computers transforming them — in real time — into their Avatar characters. Cameron believes that, for the most part, it will be impossible for audiences to tell what is real and what is virtual. “The film is the first true hybrid,” he says, “the most complicated thing I have ever done.”

So, while the cinematic world of Pandora, the distant moon where most of the film takes place, is both computer-generated and real, the main characters, including Jake’s Avatar, and Neytiri, the blue, 10ft tall Na’vi princess he falls in love with, are acted by humans, their performances translated into CGI form.
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The challenge, says Jon Landau, Cameron’s long-time producer, was to make those CGI characters “engaging and emotive. The real problem, for us, was creating the fidelity of a facial performance for the Avatar and Na’vi characters, creating a window into the soul through the eyes”.

In previous CGI films, facial expression was captured by putting scores of tiny reflective markers on an actor’s face, which were reinterpreted by a computer into the facial expressions of the CGI character. Gollum, in The Lord of the Rings, for example, was created in this way. Unfortunately, the results have never been great when CGI characters are meant to express human emotion.

Film-makers call the gulf between normal human expression and the expression of CGI characters the “uncanny valley”, which Cameron rightly says “creates this creepiness”. What he wanted was a “pure translation of the actor’s facial performance” into CGI characters such as Jake’s Avatar.

So Cameron and his team spent the first year and a half of the production process perfecting a facial-performance-capture system. The principal actors wore special head rigs fitted with tiny cameras just inches from their faces, which caught every minuscule facial motion, even their dilating pupils. As Cameron likes to say, “Actors don’t do motion. They do emotion” — emotion that is consciously and subconsciously read by us human beings.

Those millions of minute facial movements were reinterpreted by Weta Digital into the expressions of the characters. “It’s the 21st-century version of prosthetics,” Landau says.

The other significant technological advance for Avatar was that Cameron was able to direct and interact with the actors as they were performing. They worked on a large digital stage called the “performance capture volume”. As the cameras on their heads captured their facial expressions, the actors wore black bodysuits covered with reflective white dots that allowed dozens of cameras on the ceiling to track their bodily movements. The innovation was that all this visual information was translated by computers, in real time, into the movements of the CGI characters and fed into a virtual camera monitor — called a Simulcam — that Cameron could use on the stage to see exactly what was being shot, as if he were watching an approximation of the finished film. He then had a real-time view of the superimposition of live action into virtual characters, some 10ft tall, in real and CGI settings.

Beyond that, what audiences are most likely to be aware of are the very latest 3-D effects Avatar will showcase. (The film will also be screened in 2-D in many theatres.) All the live action was shot with a new, lightweight digital 3-D camera system called Fusion, developed by Cameron and his camera whiz, Vince Pace.

“3-D offers an experience which is very inclusive of the audience,” says Cameron, who vows to make all his future films in 3-D. “You get to step right into the scene. It takes that big flat screen from being a picture on a wall to being a window into another reality.” And he’s right. I’ve seen about 25 minutes of Avatar, and the 3-D effects are both stunning and immersive, without ever being gimmicky.

Despite these incredible technological advances, all of which delight him, Cameron admits that cinemagoers don’t really care about technology. “When somebody is sitting in a movie theatre and the lights go down, they couldn’t give a rat’s butt how the film is made. They just want to be swept along and taken on some magic carpet ride. And really, the less they know about how it's done, the better.”

[The Bosniak]

crazy stuff

In December 2006, Cameron explained that the delay in producing the film since the 1990s had been to wait until the technology necessary to create his project was advanced enough. The director planned to create photo-realistic computer-generated characters by using motion capture animation technology, on which he had been doing work for the past 14 months. Unlike previous performance capture systems, where the digital environment is added after the actors' motions have been captured, Cameron's new virtual camera allows him to observe directly on a monitor how the actors' virtual counterparts interact with the movie's digital world in real time and adjust and direct the scenes just as if shooting live action; "It’s like a big, powerful game engine. If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can. I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature and go through it on a 50 to 1 scale."[38] Cameron planned to continue developing the special effects for Avatar, which he hoped would be released in summer 2009. He also gave fellow directors Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson a chance to test the new technology.[39] Spielberg and George Lucas were also able to visit the set to watch Cameron direct with the equipment.[20]

Other technological innovations include a performance-capture stage, called The Volume, which is six times larger than previously used and an improved method of capturing facial expressions. The tool is a small individually made skull cap with a tiny camera attached to it, located in front of the actors' face which collects information about their facial expressions and eyes, which is then transmitted to the computers. This way, Cameron intends to transfer about 95% of the actors' performances to their digital counterparts. Besides a real time virtual world, the team is also experimenting with a way of letting computer generated characters interact with real actors on a real, live-action set while shooting live action.[40]

In January 2007, Fox announced that the studio's Avatar would be filmed in 3D at 24 frames per second. Cameron described the film as a hybrid with a full live-action shoot in combination with computer-generated characters and live environments. "Ideally at the end of the day the audience has no idea which they’re looking at," Cameron said. The director indicated that he had already worked four months on nonprincipal scenes for the film. Principal photography began in April 2007,[41] and was done around parts of Los Angeles as well as New Zealand. The live action is shot with the proprietary Fusion digital 3-D camera system developed by Cameron and Vince Pace. According to Cameron, the film will be composed of 60% computer-generated elements and 40% live action, as well as traditional miniatures.[42] The performance-capture photography would last 31 days at the Hughes Aircraft stage in Playa Vista, Los Angeles, California.[29][43] In October, Cameron was scheduled to shoot live-action in New Zealand[15] for another 31 days.[6]

To create the human mining colony on Pandora, production designers visited the Noble Clyde Boudreaux drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico during June 2007. They photographed, measured and filmed every aspect of the rig, which will be replicated on-screen with photorealistic CGI.[44] Around 1000 people worked on the production.

[El Jefe]

looks cool but I dont know if its going to capture attention on a national level to be financially successful. He may have to sell the Titanic to recover for losses

[Mihim]

Originally Posted by P.A.T

looks cool but I dont know if its going to capture attention on a national level to be financially successful. He may have to sell the Titanic to recover for losses

you would know about titanic losses considering your fat bitch ass mama always trying to give you away..

bitch


and i have high hopes for this money..but every time i see the trailer i get a big "wtf?" rattling around in my head..

[The Bosniak]

why is that

[Mihim]

well...the whole story looks very outlandish...i mean compared to terminator and aliens and all but still...and the budget seems huge...there are no big names attached to the movie other then James Cameron and Sigourney Weaver...no big stars to bring in the masses...so even if it was good..it probably won't recoup it's loss (if any loss does occur)

you know the regular shit that happens to big blockbuster movies like this...

but if anyone can pull it off...it's JC!

[Stand Steel]

Looks beautiful. Dunno about the plot or acting though. The little dialogue I heard in the trailer seems cliche or amateur. I WILL go see this though. I have mad respect for Cameron, especially after Aquaman beat Spiderman.

[The Bosniak]

Originally Posted by Namedrop

I have mad respect for Cameron, especially after Aquaman beat Spiderman.

lol....

[Tebo]

I was not fully fully impressed until I saw the trailor I've linked below, this shit is beyond anything ever by FAR & it's gonna look alot nuttier in theatre

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/dor/ob...tor_chase.html

this is the nuttiest trailor I've seen so far, appologies I dunno how to put the vid onto here, worth the watch tho

as for this not doing well in theatres? everyone will see it to see the nutty graphics, it's going to blow any 3D movie away, this shit will be amazing to watch in theatres....

[The Bosniak]

if it doesnt do well it'll be a shock...and the first cameron blockbuster not to merk

[Freeney]

looks stupid and cartoonish.

[.......The ?.......]

Originally Posted by Freeney

looks stupid and cartoonish.

i agree about it looks cartoonish can't decide if that's a bad thing or good yet, the performances will make or break it.

[Freeney]

Originally Posted by H.S.R-Das-G.M

i agree about it looks cartoonish can't decide if that's a bad thing or good yet, the performances will make or break it.

when i seen this trailer i felt like i was watching a bugs life or ANT......lol

[Tebo]

^ your ignorant as fuck to say it looks cartoonish, it's going to be amazing

This will NOT flop, the budget is over 400 mill so it will be hard to get back but it will not flop at all, Camron didn't invent new technology and his own digital camera that's better than film, to 'flop' for this movie

It will spread by word of mouth how nutty it is in theatres & should do well

[Freeney]

Originally Posted by Tebo

^ your ignorant as fuck to say it looks cartoonish, it's going to be amazing

This will NOT flop, the budget is over 400 mill so it will be hard to get back but it will not flop at all, Camron didn't invent new technology and his own digital camera that's better than film, to 'flop' for this movie

It will spread by word of mouth how nutty it is in theatres & should do well

suck a fat babies dick......you fucking nerd.