![]() ![]() ![]() Cameron has built up enormous fame and power based on his reputation as a technical innovator-pushing the science and technology of modelmaking, digital animation and camera engineering. But so, to an extent, is James Cameron's stature as an unstoppable force in Hollywood. Why is the computer-generated face of a blue, cat-eyed human–alien hybrid so important? Well, for one thing, lots of money is riding on it. But Cameron was looking for empathy, and in the first footage, that's not what he got. Sometimes audience unease is to a character's advantage in The Lord of the Rings the creature Gollum was supposed to be unsettling. (Think of the penguins in Happy Feet.) But if you try to give a digital character a humanoid face, anything short of perfection can be uncanny-thus the term. If you map human movements and expression to cute furry creatures that dance and sing like people, then audiences willingly suspend disbelief and go along with it. Audiences are especially sensitive to renderings of the human face, and the closer a digital creation gets to a photorealistic human, the higher expectations get. It's called the uncanny valley, and it's a problem for roboticists and animators alike. The reaction Cameron was feeling has a name. We've done everything right and this is what it looks like?" "Horrible! It was dead, it was awful, it wasn't Sam. It "scared the crap out of me," Cameron recalls. But after millions of dollars of research and development, the Avatar's face was not only lifeless, it was downright creepy. To make the whole thing work, Worthington's performance, those subtle expressions that sell a character to the audience, had to come through the face of his Avatar. The onscreen rendering of Worthington was supposed to be a sort of digital sleight of hand-a human character inhabiting an alien body so that he could blend into an alien world, played by a human actor inhabiting a digital body in a digital world. Cameron was staring directly into Worthington's face-or, rather, he was looking into the face of a digitally rendered Worthington as a creature with blue skin and large yellow eyes-but he might as well have been staring into a Kabuki mask. Playing Sully is Sam Worthington, an Australian actor whom Cameron had plucked from obscurity to play the movie's hero. Glowing sprites float through Pandora's atmosphere, landing on Sully as Neytiri determines if he can be trusted. The scene on Cameron's screen at Playa Vista-an important turning point in the movie's plot-showed Na'vi princess Neytiri, played by Zoë Saldana, as she first encounters Sully's Avatar in the jungles of Pandora. Part action–adventure, part interstellar love story, the project was so ambitious that it took 10 more years before Cameron felt cinema technology had advanced to the point where Avatar was even possible. In his view, making Avatar would require blending live-action sequences and digitally captured performances in a three-dimensional, computer-generated world. The human settlers are interested in mining Pandora's resources but can't breathe its toxic atmosphere, so to help explore the moon and meet with the native Na'vi who live there, Sully has his consciousness linked with a genetically engineered 9-foot-tall human–alien hybrid.Ĭameron wrote his first treatment for the movie in 1995 with the intention of pushing the boundaries of what was possible with cinematic digital effects. ![]() Jake Sully, a former Marine paralyzed from the waist down during battle on Earth, has traveled to this lush, green world teeming with exotic, bioluminescent life to take part in the military's Avatar program. The film-although "film" seems to be an anachronistic term for such a digitally intense production-takes place on a moon called Pandora, which circles a distant planet. But as Cameron looked into his computer monitor, he knew something had gone terribly wrong. Cameron's studio partner, Twentieth Century Fox, had already committed to a budget of $200 million (the final cost is reportedly closer to $300 million) on what promised to be the most technologically advanced work of cinema ever undertaken. He was viewing early footage from Avatar, the sci-fi epic he had been dreaming about since his early 20s. Two years ago, movie director James Cameron was in the Playa Vista studio at a crucial stage in his own big, risky project. In the 1940s, Howard Hughes used the huge wooden airplane hangar to construct the massive plywood H-4 Hercules seaplane-famously known as the Spruce Goose. The 280,000-square-foot studio in Playa Vista, Calif., has a curious history as a launching pad for big, risky ideas.
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