James Cameron's Avatar

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I guarantee this movies a sure thing. Camerons non advertising of a movie he knows his diehard audience will see is smart. Rather than use the same tiredassed marketing strategy imo Camerons looking to make a real impression. Blair Witch was possibly the best promoted marketed movie ever so dont tell me theres not room for improvment. I believe also Camerons been critical of the industries marketing of film. He knows more than anybody else what it takes to make money. A constant returning audience for his film week after week, and not just opening weekend.

For the industry to survive they must revive the returning audience as the shine is off the star regarding "opening weekend is all" marketing. Titanic made steady money for a long damn time thanks to teenage girls + Leonardo DiCaprio. Take out Leo, and replace with 3D. I will see this, and if it somehows a bomb Id not feels as bad because it "had" to be seen. Its been a long damn time I was so decisive about an upcoming movie, and I aint hard to sell. For shame hollywood for shame!



Ticket Details Announced for Avatar Day on August 21st!




Details on how to get tickets to see 16 minutes of footage from James Cameron's Avatar have finally been uncovered thanks to the LA Times. Starting on Monday, August 17th at Noon PST on the official Avatar website - AvatarMovie.com - Fox will be giving away first-come, first-serve tickets for free. There will be two screenings on Friday, August 21st (one at 6:00PM, the other at 6:30PM) in over 100 IMAX 3D theaters around the world. We don't have exact details on which theaters will be involved, but it looks like it'll only be in IMAX, so you better find the nearest one now. These tickets will probably go very fast on Monday.

The Avatar preview on August 21st will be in 3D and include an introduction from James Cameron and 16 minutes of footage, some of which wasn't even shown during Comic-Con. It was originally announced that they would be showing 15 minutes, but that was probably an early estimate. We're guessing that they'll also show the new trailer which hits on the 21st as well (or you'll be able to catch that online or while you're at the theater anyway). So if you don't make it into one of these showings, don't worry, you'll still be able to get a glimpse at Avatar in the trailer. This sounds like it will be a once-in-a-lifetime event - so don't miss it!

Source: FirstShowing.net




First Look: Sam Worthington in the First Real Avatar Photo!


Although the trailer will be online in about a week (next Friday), Fox has released the first official production photo from James Cameron's Avatar featuring Sam Worthington and his Avatar (in the background). Thanks to SlashFilm for first discovering this, as it's a very big reveal. Those who were at Comic-Con and saw the footage (including the scene that this is from) know all about the Avatars, but for everyone else in the world, this is their first look at James Cameron's world and at least one of the creatures that you'll find on Pandora. Check out the first Avatar photo below!


Avatar is the story of an ex-Marine (Sam Worthington) who finds himself thrust into hostilities on an alien planet filled with exotic life forms. As an Avatar, a human mind in an alien body, he finds himself torn between two worlds, in a desperate fight for his own survival and that of the indigenous people. This is from a scene early on where Worthington enters a lab and meets his Avatar for the first time and goes through the procedure to integrate his mind into it.

Source: FirstShowing.net



Apple has starting promoting that it will debut the first trailer for James Cameron's Avatar on Thursday at 7am, a day before expected and a day earlier than the upcoming "Avatar Day" next Friday, when footage from the film will be screened for the public.

Source: Sci Fi Wire



28 days...6 hours...42 minutes...12 seconds
I want to go into this completely blind.

So whatever pictures and trailers pop up, I'm going to try my best to avoid them.

Anyone get tickets for Avatar Day?
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Alternative link, courtesy of AICN's TalkBack, via Peter/OG-:

http://specials.divertissements.fr.m...r/default.aspx

Posted this in The Shoutbox as well: I'll reserve full judgment until I can get my hands on a really high-res version, but some of those shots looked awfully close to photorealistic. I think the technology probably doesn't constitute the remarkable leap forward we were hearing about, but it still looks like a big step. Excitement definitely still intact.



I am burdened with glorious purpose
wow, I was not interested in this movie at all until I saw that. Looks amazing.

I didn't know anything about this, but after watching the trailer, I was looking around and this really struck me (from wikipedia):

In 1995, director James Cameron wrote an 80-page scriptment for Avatar.[3] Cameron said his inspiration was "every single science fiction book I read as a kid", and that he was particularly striving to update the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter series. Cameron saw his story as being about how advanced civilizations supplant indigenous cultures, in either actively genocidal or more unpremeditated ways, and was influenced by the story of Pocahontas.[17] In Avatar, humanity extends that practice to entire planets.
Love the premise! Although you all probably know about this already. But not only does the film look interesting, I'm pretty excited about the premise, too.



well I dont know not that impressed just saw the teaser trailer and to be honest looks like a little bit like star wars with all the effects and environments but this is just me maybe I need more proof.Plus there was so buzz about it that for a moment there I thought I was not going to watch a movie but I dont know maybe something on the next level however we will see it's too early to judge
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The trailer looks stiff to me, even now.

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I just watched the trailer. I am very impressed. This will deserve an Oscar. Is it possible this film will do better at the box office than The Dark Knight?



And now Avatar – which looks like nothing more than a continuation of the work done in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. 3D CGI and integration of CGI and live action. Dare I say, Who Killed Roger Rabbit?
I don't know about Roger Rabbit, but I understand what you mean with Final Fantasy. Cinema Blend viewed the 15 minutes of Avatar today being that it was Avatar Day. The guy had this to say..

Today was Avatar Day which, if you haven’t been following along, means moviegoers lining up to see fifteen minutes of James Cameron’s upcoming movie Avatar. For years now we’ve been deluged with wild claims about the spectacle that was about to unfold. Groundbreaking, game changing, we’ve been told. Brand new 3D technology like you’ve never seen before, they’ve claimed. Photorealistic computer animation, they’ve cried. Now that we’ve seen fifteen minutes it’s plainly obvious that none of that is exactly true.

For a detailed breakdown of the scenes shown, check out the report of the same footage which was shown at Comic Con. The question for me isn’t what I saw but whether or not it delivers. The answer to that question is, unfortunately, only sort of.

Avatar looks like the best cartoon you’ve ever seen. The fifteen minutes we saw included a few moments of live action footage, with actors like Sam Worthington and Sigourney Weaver up on screen interacting, but most of it is entirely CGI and it’s reasonable to assume that most of the film will be as well. Much of the fifteen minute preview is spent watching computer generated, blue-skinned aliens interacting with brightly-colored, computer-generated environments. It’s good animation, don’t get me wrong. It’s good in much the same way that Pixar’s animation is good, with impressively detailed environments and great motion-capture work on the way the aliens move and jump and run (Though Cameron's animation doesn't seem up to the task of rippling muscles as arms flex and legs bend... maybe naked aliens wasn't the way to go.). But it’s still animation. There’s never a moment where you’ll sit there and think, for even a second, that you’re watching something real.

For all his wizardry, that’s something James Cameron still can’t accomplish, that’s something that can only really be accomplished by using an actual set. Aliens feels more real than this does, or ever will. For that matter even Peter Jackson’s computer generated Gollum looks more real, if only because Jackson had the good sense to mix his computer animated creatures in with live action sets. Gollum looks like he exists because the world around him actually does. It’s a lot like the 2001 computer animated movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. It too made similarly photorealistic claims which, while it looked good, it was unable to deliver on. Nothing in the fifteen minutes of Avatar shown today is real or feels real. Avatar is a cartoon. Maybe it’ll be a really good cartoon, a feat of brilliant visual animation, but still animation.

The same is true of the much vaunted, brand new 3D technology used on the film. Avatar Day’s fifteen was shown in IMAX 3D and, if I’d never seen anything in IMAX 3D before then what I saw today would almost certainly have blown my mind. It might be the greatest thing I’d ever seen. But I have seen movies in IMAX 3D and I know what it’s all about and this is, at best, only a hairs breadth better than the other things you’ve already seen projected in front of your 3D glasses. It’s worth noting that in the fifteen we were shown Cameron’s film never resorts to any of the usual 3D, leap out of the screen gimmicks. Instead 3D is really only used to provide depth to what’s going on. It’s like looking out a window instead of watching something flat projected in front of you. It’s well done, but it’s been done before.

Audience reaction to the event seem to reflect that. Afterward the mixed crowd I saw it with in Dallas’s Cinemark IMAX engaged in a smattering of applause as the footage ended, abruptly and the lights came on. Then we all sat there for a moment confused, unsure whether it was over or if they was more to come. Nothing happened and so the somewhat befuddled audience filed out without pomp and circumstance. Avatar Day was delivered, on the whole, in a fairly turnstile fashion. People line up, go in and watch, muddle their way out and another group goes in. Aside from a special filmed introduction by James Cameron, Fox made little effort to really make the event special. The rather average nature of Avatar aside, the day itself came and went without much worth remembering. Hey Fox, how about a free t-shirt or a Titanic sing-a-long or something?

In the end I drove forty-five minutes to an IMAX theater to watch fifteen minutes of footage that’s not all that much more impressive than the trailer I’d seen the day before. The movie, I have every confidence, may be good. But it’s not the next Star Wars. Should there be an 'Avatar Day 2', I’m staying home. Yet when Avatar itself is finally in theaters I’ll be first line, holding a ticket, with my expectations appropriately lowered.
If Avatar really turns out to be as bad as the 15 minutes he viewed, I'm gonna be upset.



Looks a bit of a diversion from his past films, more of an organic feel. The space marines are back I see.
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- Terminator 2 where he takes credit for CGI work already developed and used in Willow (three years earlier).
The work in Terminator 2 is on an entirely different level than what we saw in Willow. In Willow, most of what we see is morphing from one set of photos to another in a fixed location. In T2, the morphing involves an actual person, there's all sorts of movement while it's morphing, and at times it it is seamlessly attached to a human actor.

Also, please show me where he "took credit" for this. I don't recall any press junkets or behind-the-scenes documentaries where Cameron jumped up and down and said "I'm the only person who's ever done anything even remotely like this!" Directors tend to get most of the credit, but that doesn't mean they "take" it.

- Titanic (his little expedition he undertook to promote his movie) where he attempted to take the glory from Bob Ballard, who found the Titanic.
Again, show me how he "took the glory." And please explain why the fact that someone else found the Titanic somehow invalidates the creation of the film Titanic. The discovery of the ship helped with theories about how things went down, and allowed them to replicate certain rooms, but if anything that made his work on the film harder, as he suddenly had a more detailed and reliable history to (try to) match. Either way, they're two entirely separate events and the fact that Cameron is praised for Titanic is a reflection of the incredible skill and effort that went into it, none of which is even remotely minimized by who discovered the ship.

- Space engineering technologies, where he has been working with NASA and putting forward other people’s ideas as somehow original. Some pretty stupid ideas, too.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.

- And now Avatar – which looks like nothing more than a continuation of the work done in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. 3D CGI and integration of CGI and live action. Dare I say, Who Killed Roger Rabbit?
Er, no. Whether or not Avatar looks particularly great, or is a particularly great film remains to be seen, but there's simply no denying that it represents a new manner of filmmaking. Your examples are mind-bendingly goofy. Who Killed Roger Rabbit? required painstaking precision with no margin for error, where animation had to be settled on long in advance and physical actors were restricted so as not to interfere with the later stages of production. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and The Phantom Menace are simply CGI productions, overlayed on film.

Avatar is motion-capture based (if you wanted to mock it, you should've referenced Beowulf or something), for one, and it uses a "virtual" camera that can change the angle on its CGI in real-time (at least, from what I understand of the technology). This is simply unprecedented. Being able to make changes to CGI films without having to completely re-render or re-orchestrate a shot or scene is a big deal any way you look at it.

Now he will be hailed as a genius for spending $200 million on a cartoon. And guess what folks? The true artists that made this movie will get no fame. They will get paid, maybe get an Oscar and industry work – but James Cameron will get all the real public credit.
Make up your mind: either it's a stupid retread "cartoon" or you're concerned about the "true artists" getting credit. It can't be both.

Besides, if this is your real gripe, it applies to any film with significant special effects. Sometimes CGI creation is an art, and sometimes it's more of a skill. Are the CGI "artists" the ones thinking up these creatures, or are they duplicating something Cameron drew or orchestrated? The former is creative; the latter is not, and from what I understand, this is a world Cameron dreamt up.

And in ten years it will look like crap – like all CGI movies. From what I have seen of it already, I actually expect it to look shabby in just a couple of years. The trailer looks stiff to me, even now.
By this logic, all CGI is bad because it'll look dated eventually.

Of course, Jurassic Park is 16 years old. The Abyss is about 20 years old, I believe. Neither of them looks crappy.



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Can I just be the first to say that while it does look beautiful, at times, other times it doesn't and on the other aspects, this movie looks like crap?
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