Why James Cameron waited to create Avatar

James Cameron's 2009 blockbuster hit, Avatar stepped over boundaries that had not been crossed in the cinema and CGI world ever before. Nominated for 9 Academy Awards, and winning 3, Avatar is also the #1 All Time Domestic movie ever, and the #1 All Time Worldwide movie. But what made this movie so different than any other, and why was it not done sooner? As a matter of fact, James Cameron wanted to release the movie in 1999 because he had the story complete, but did not have the proper technology to complete it until it was released in 2009. What convinced him that CGI effects had progressed enough is when he saw the motion-capture CGI animation that was done to Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. The movie is more than half CGI, and each frame of the CHI scenes took an average of 47 hours to render. When I was in London this past fall semester, I worked on a Sci-Fi list documentary where I was able to help find extensive facts about the movies that we were given and able to contact people to interview for the documentary. I researched Avatar extensively and was able to find out this amazing information plus so much more, and was astonished by the achievements and advancements that were made throughout the process and production of this movie. Here's a few of the videos I watched to learn more about Avatar. 

Stop Motion with Legos

So I was wandering around the internet this weekend while I was on duty and I found this little production group called Brotherhood Workshop that makes fantasy story videos. The use A LOT of stop motion and I am not complaining about it. The first video I watched was this one where they took one of the new Lord of the Rings Lego sets and made the funny video below. They even edited in sparkling candle flames and torch flames! (Keep an eye out for Gollum and for a Star Wars cameo)

                 

Here's an image from the behind the scenes of my favorite video called "Orcs" featuring two orcs, one chilling on a laptop and the other enjoying a mug of joe.

Each video seems to based on different Lord of the Rings lego sets but have a variety of other LOTR sets included in them. Watching these videos reminded me of when I was younger when my dad, brother, and I would sit around for hours making stop motion videos with the Legos my brother and I owned and then my dad helping us with recording the audio later. I would have included an example clip but those videos have been lost for many a year.

The work to make Gollum

So I love Lord of the Rings and Matt's post a while ago reminded me how much cool stuff is in those movies. I'm going to talk about Gollum.

So first of all, Andy Serkis is a pretty fantastic actor. Second of all, the amount of planning and foresight on Peter Jackson's part to put all of the Gollum scenes together is crazy. They at least shoot every scene three times: Once with everyone in the scene, once with just Sam and Frodo (or whoever is in the scene with Gollum), and then once with Andy Serkis alone on a blue screen using motion capture. The motion capture process is also really cool.

So many steps go into the process of making a character like Gollum. They use the real footage as a guide for the animators but they make decisions regarding the shaping of Gollum's character and his mannerisms and such. Ultimately they did a fantastic job integrating Gollum into the film. He is such a vital character, one that couldn't have been realistically portrayed through just makeup and costume, and the animation was spot on.