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. 

Performance Capture

Performance capture is a type of acting involving body sensors that track movement. Cameras at different angles record the movement in order to create a three-dimensional position of the character. The data is mapped on a digital model in 3D software, like Maya for example, so that the digital character moves like the recorded actor.

Below is a video featuring James Cameron and the performance technology used in Avatar.

"We don't have to necessarily believe that they're 100% photo real and we don't necessarily have to believe that they actually exist--but we do have to believe them as emotional creatures," Cameron says on the Avatars in the film.

I find the head rig most interesting. It's a helmet like structure that fits comfortably on the head, along with a camera that captures the facial expression and performance.

Stickin' to What I Know

You guessed it! Rendering yet again. I don't know what it is about it, but I find it so fascinating. I think it's because of all of the computing power that goes into things like this. ANYWAY. I decided to make this post about the rendering related to James Cameron's Avatar.

Now I was looking through some articles and though I wasn't able to find how many frames were in the film, I was able to find how much storage was used to store the movie. While looking at the article, I found that it took 1 PETABYTE of storage. To put this into perspective, take 500 2 Terabyte drives and put them in a room... That's a Petabyte. Talk about huge. The place that rendered this is the same place that rendered King Kong and Lord of the Rings. You KNOW that this is a high class place when you hear those two movies in the same sentence.

Onto my favorite part of these articles: The computing power of these facilities. In the article it states that there are 34 racks of 32 machines. Doing some math that equates to 1088 machines. But going even deeper, there are about 40,000 processors and 104 Terabytes of RAM. TERABYTES OF RAM. That amount of ram is so much RAM, I can run 15 different video games, most likely 3 times over. Needless to say I couldn't even dream of that much RAM in a machine, let alone under one roof.

A small tid bit about this too: Cameron had a 300 million dollar budget according to this article. The storage alone for this movie would have been in the millions. That's just plain ridiculous.

If you want to read the article I got this info from, it's right here.

I may be super late to this party but over the summer for the first time I watch the Movie Avatar by written an directed by james cameron I originally wrote the film off as a block buster that i wouldn't be interested with too much cgi. but when i watched it i found my self happily surprised with the movie and even got a little teary eyed at certain points it was only after i was done watching the film that i realized i forgot that so much of the movie was basicly a cgi cartoon that really blew my mind because normally i can pick up on things like that. that movie came out almost 5 years ago its exciting to know that motion capture and animation technology has advanced beyond even that.

making of ... titanic 3d

i wanted to take a quick look at the process of retrofitting the original Titanic movie, into the current film which is in 3D.

this first clip shows James Cameron, the writer/director of the film, simply explains his reasoning for recreating the classic Titanic into 3D and briefly touches on the extensive work that went into retrofitting the original

this original clip is actually from the 1997 film; explaining how they used the green screen (yay green screen!) to make "the million dollar shot" of Jack and Rose at the edge of the ship. it really just shows that green screen graphics is so simple -- almost exactly what we did last week; only their added graphics are much more in-depth and extensive.

this clip, although does not include any audio, seems to show a timeline of how animators added 3D elements to the original film ... i don't really have much to say because they do not explain what they are doing, but I thought it was a cool clip of the transformation

Behind the Scenes of Avatar

So for the first ever, I saw Avatar this week and I was immediately amazed at the visual and special effects that were used throughout the entire film. I couldn't help but think of all the long exhausting process that it must have taken to make this idea a reality. Therefore after watching the movie, I went online and started looking for some behind the scenes videos and learning more about the hard work and time that it took to make this. The production of this film went above and beyond the simple use of a green screen and after effects. While I was on my search for videos I did come across this 22min behind the scenes video that covered everything from the casting of the characters to the various types of special cameras and technology that was used in the production process. If you have the time it is definitely a video worth watching, and I personally really enjoyed it and learned alot!!

ENJOY!