The expectations for James Cameron’s Avatar just keep on growing! An article from Time magazine focuses on the future of 3D movies, and most importantly on Avatar. Here are a few interesting snippets:
Cameron’s Avatar, due in December, could be the thing that forces theaters to convert to digital. Spielberg predicts it will be the biggest 3-D live-action film ever. More than a thousand people have worked on it, at a cost in excess of $300 million, and it represents digital filmmaking’s bleeding edge.
The film is set in the future, and most of the action takes place on a mythical planet, Pandora. The actors work in an empty studio; Pandora’s lush jungle-aquatic environment is computer-generated in New Zealand by Jackson’s special-effects company, Weta Digital, and added later.
I couldn’t tell what was real and what was animated–even knowing that the 9-ft.-tall blue, dappled dude couldn’t possibly be real. The scenes were so startling and absorbing that the following morning, I had the peculiar sensation of wanting to return there, as if Pandora were real.
Cameron wasn’t surprised. One theory, he says, is that 3-D viewing “is so close to a real experience that it actually triggers memory creation in a way that 2-D viewing doesn’t.” His own theory is that stereoscopic viewing uses more neurons. That’s possible. After watching all that 3-D, I was a bit wiped out. I was also totally entertained.
To read the whole article, including quotes from Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg about filming Tintin, click here!
Update: TIME has updated its article with the following correction: “The original version of this story misstated the cost of the film Avatar as being in excess of $300 million. The correct figure is in excess of $200 million.”
