Avatar/James Cameron Notes

• CGI was used to create the film
• December 2009 - Premiere in the UK and USA
• It is the highest grossing film ever
• Its the best selling 3D film
• Many different specialised cameras were used to film the movie
• Film critics describe this film as an "Innovative Sci-Fi film". This means that the film is ahead of its time or it has done something different that other Sci-Fi films haven't done before, so it changed the way Sci-Fi films can be made
• It took James Cameron 15years to produce Avatar. From the initial idea to the release of the film
• James Cameron also directed Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986) and Titanic (1997)
• The film's budget was $237,000,000 and its Gross Revenue was approximately $2,800,000,000
• Cameron was also a CEO of a Visual Editing Company when he was creating a film called Brother Termite (1993). The film wasn't completed but James Cameron released 2mins of footage from the film showing the 'Performance Capture' technology which was used to create it
• This technology was also used in the creation of Avatar
• 20th Century Fox (Film Distribution Corporation) supported (funded) Cameron with Avatar for over a year
• Cameron wanted the characters of Avatar to be “animal like” but still be physically attractive to the audience
• Most of the jungle set in the film was based on landscapes in China, Venezuela and New Zealand
• There was deep and detailed research during the creation of the film. For example Cameron hired botanists to help with the design of the plants in the film so they could be digitally created to look realistic
• This showed that the process of creating a film involves much more different factors than just hiring actors and writers
• WETA is a special effects company, based in New Zealand, who helped produce Avatar
• During the creation of Avatar, 20^th Century Fox kept insisting that the film needed a famous actor/actress to star in the film for it to be successful
• So they hired Sigourney Weaver, who was a notable actress from Aliens (1986)
• Cameron also hired a linguist to assist with the making of the main language used in the Avatar plot to create a unique language for the characters to use
• Captured Performance is a technology used in Avatar
• Cameron also hired an actual soldier who fought in Desert Storm to train the actors/actresses (Method Acting)
• It took two years (2005-2007) for the film producers to master the performance capture technology
• Reference and Visual Cameras were used to film Avatar
• Most of the film was filmed using virtual environments/backgrounds
• The production wasn’t easy as the hardware/software used by the film makers would often crash as they were pushing the boundaries (doing things that haven’t been done before-innovative)
• There was 140 members of the crew
• The different sets (live action with the humans) and the CGI with the avatar characters made the actors/actresses feel like it was two different films, which shows it was a lot more hard work than a usual film
• Cameron also hired a helicopter pilot to assist with the flying scenes in the film
• Fusion camera – shoots actors and live action on 3D Sets. It was designed to be a state of the art cinema camera
• Virtual camera – more like a monitor because it displays all the different angles of the references cameras scattered around the set
• RIG programming controls how facial expressions are shown in the animation of the film. This was used to make the Avatars facial expressions/body gestures extremely realistic
• It took over a year for WETA to animate a section of the film (Feb 2007 to May 2008) to animate 10/11 shots of the film
• The film consisted of 2600 shots in total
• Took out 40mins of film at least as some bits were too long to be kept in the film
• From 2008, Avatar became even more difficult to make as the set deadlines kept getting missed whilst the film release date was coming up only a year later
• As WETA got used to the type of animation for the film it became easier for them to animate more shots in less time