Way back before Avatar had even been release, James Cameron sat down with Popular Mechanics to talk about how he ended up inventing a completely new way of creating CG movies with his Stereoscopic-Virtual hybrid camera. He also explained how CG animation will never replace real actors because it is not the geeks behind the computers who are driving the performance, but rather the actors themselves through the motion capture technology. Taken from the Popular Mechanics article:

In fact, Cameron doesn’t even like the term “motion capture” for the process used on Avatar. He prefers to call it “performance capture.” This may seem like semantics, but to Cameron, the subtle facial expressions that define an actor’s performance had been lost for many of the digital characters that have come before. In those films, the process of motion capture served only as a starting point for animators, who would finish the job with digital brush strokes. “Gollum’s face was entirely animated by hand,” says Weta Digital effects master Joe Letteri. “King Kong was a third or so straight performance capture. It was never automatic.” This time, Cameron wanted to keep the embellishment by animators to a minimum and let the actors drive their own performances.

It’s probably this misconception that caused Avatar to loose out on best picture at the Oscars recently. Perhaps those at the Academy see CGI as a threat to future acting talent. James Cameron thinks otherwise.

The new extended trailer has been released for James Cameron’s Avatar, and this time there is more information on the plot and the characters. It seems that the humans are trying to mine a valuable mineral from the land of the indigenous race, and they have genetically engineered creatures that they can control remotely to infiltrate the local population. While doing so, a soldier starts to question his orders as he learns more about the culture of the aliens, and how it is being destroyed.

To coincide with the release of the trailer for James Cameron’s highly anticipated Avatar, sold-out theaters all over the world showed 15mins of footage to critics, journalists and the general public, and it apparently went down a storm.

The fact that it’s Cameron’s first film since his 1997 movie Titanic, creates enough hype on its own. The story of Avatar was first conceived by Cameron eleven years ago, but he held off production until about four years ago when CGI technology was at a stage where he could fully achieve his ideas. And it is the CG that will be what everyone remembers about the film, for Cameron has invested heavily in the latest 3D stereoscopic techniques, as mentioned by MailOnline’s Eddie Wrenn:

Cameron also devised a ‘virtual camera’, a hand-held monitor that allowed him to move through a 3D terrain.This, Cameron said, allowed him to create ‘the ultimate immersive media’, which he anticipates will exceed any and all expectation. In essence, this allowed Cameron to direct the film as if it was computer game. If he wanted to change the viewpoint, he could click a few buttons on a mouse and a computer would redraw the virtual world from the new perspective.

The film’s budget is a massive $237m, so some people in audiences on release day in December may be expecting to be blown away, time will tell, but based on a review in the Guardian, Cameron may succeed:

There’s a moment in the footage I saw this morning, just after Jake has been rescued from a pack of baying, canine types, by a radiant, dread-locked Na’vi lady (who appears to be the flick’s romantic interest) when he looks around and takes in his surroundings for the first time. And it’s here that Cameron is most successful – not in the action sequences, which are admittedly remarkable and make excellent use of 3D, nor in the superb scene onboard the spaceship in which Jake’s brain is first fused with his alien body. I felt completely immersed in the sublime, bizarre beauty of the Pandorian rainforest, both comforted by its warmth, and unnerved by its inherent perversity. And that, certainly, is tribute to the 3D work – the dripping fronds almost seem to lick your face, the humidity makes you feel you should be perspiring.