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Avatar (2009 film)

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Avatar
File:Avatar-Teaser-Poster.jpg
Teaser poster
Directed byJames Cameron
Written byJames Cameron
Produced byJames Cameron
Jon Landau
StarringSam Worthington
Zoë Saldaña
Sigourney Weaver
Michelle Rodriguez
Stephen Lang
Joel David Moore
Giovanni Ribisi
CCH Pounder
Dileep Rao
Matt Gerald
Laz Alonso
Peter Mensah
Wes Studi
CinematographyMauro Fiore
Edited byJohn Refoua
Stephen E. Rivkin
Music byJames Horner
Production
company
Distributed by20th Century Fox
Release date
December 16, 2009
Running time
165 minutes [1]
LanguageEnglish
BudgetGB£180 million[2]

Avatar is an upcoming 3-D science fiction epic film directed by James Cameron, due to be released on December 16, 2009[3] by 20th Century Fox. The film is Lightstorm Entertainment's latest project.[4]

It is expected Avatar will revolutionize technology used in filmography. There are already a number of adaptations of Avatar, including a novelization and those in the form of a video game and action figures.

Premise

The story’s protagonist, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), is a former Marine who was wounded and paralyzed from the waist down in combat on Earth. Jake is selected to participate in the Avatar program, which will enable him to walk. Jake travels to Pandora, a lush jungle-covered extraterrestrial moon filled with incredible life forms, some beautiful, many terrifying. Pandora is also home to the Na’vi, a sentient humanoid race, who are considered primitive, yet are more physically capable than humans. Standing three meters tall (approximately 10 ft), with tails and sparkling blue skin, the Na’vi live in harmony with their unspoiled world. As humans encroach deeper into Pandora's forests in search of valuable minerals, the Na’vi unleash their formidable warrior abilities to defend their threatened existence.

Jake has unwittingly been recruited to become part of this encroachment. Since humans are unable to breathe the air on Pandora, they have created genetically-bred human-Na’vi hybrids known as Avatars. On Pandora, through his Avatar body, Jake can be whole once again. Sent deep into Pandora's jungles as a scout for the soldiers that will follow, Jake encounters many of Pandora's beauties and dangers. There he meets a young Na’vi female, Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña).

Over time, Jake integrates himself into the Na'vi clan, and begins to fall in love with Neytiri. As a result, Jake finds himself caught between the military-industrial forces of Earth and the Na’vi, forcing him to choose sides in an epic battle that will decide the fate of an entire world.

Cast

  • Sam Worthington as Jake Sully. Cameron cast the Australian actor after searching the world for promising young actors, preferring relative unknowns to keep the budget down. Worthington auditioned twice early in development,[5] and he has signed on for possible sequels.[6] Cameron felt because Worthington had not done a major film, he was "game for anything", giving the character "a quality that is really real. He has that quality of being a guy you'd want to have a beer with, and he ultimately becomes a leader who transforms the world."[7]
  • Zoe Saldaña as Neytiri, a princess of the Na'vi tribe central to the story, who is attracted to Jake because of his bravery.[8] The character, like all the Na'vi, will be entirely computer generated.[9] Saldaña has also signed on for potential sequels.[6]
  • Sigourney Weaver as Dr. Grace Augustine, a botanist who mentors Jake Sully.[10] Weaver dyed her hair red for the part.[11] Her character was named "Shipley" at one point.[12] The character reminded Weaver of Cameron, being "very driven and very idealistic".[13]
  • Michelle Rodriguez as Trudy Chacon, a retired Marine pilot. Cameron had wanted to work with Rodriguez since seeing her in Girlfight.[14]
  • Giovanni Ribisi as SecFor administrator Carter Selfridge, a passive-aggressive character.[15]
  • Joel David Moore as Norm Spellman, an anthropologist who studies plant and nature life (like Weaver's character)[citation needed].
  • CCH Pounder as Moha, the Na'vi queen.[16]
  • Stephen Lang as SecFor's Colonel Miles Quaritch. Lang had unsuccessfully auditioned for a role in Cameron's Aliens (1986); the director remembered Lang and cast him in Avatar.[14] Michael Biehn was considered for the role of Colonel Quaritch. He met with James Cameron three times and saw some of the 3D footage, but in the end it simply came down to the fact that Cameron didn't want people thinking it was Aliens all over again, as Sigourney Weaver had already been cast.[citation needed]
  • Dileep Rao as Dr. Max Patel.[17]
  • Matt Gerald as SecFor's Corporal Lyle Wainfleet, the second-most prominent villain, after Quaritch.[18]

Actors Laz Alonso as Tsu'Tey, Peter Mensah as Akwey, and Wes Studi are also in the film.[19]

Production

Development

In 1994, director James Cameron wrote an 80-page scriptment for Avatar.[5] 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[citation needed]. In Avatar, humanity extends that practice to entire planets.[5] The premise of a paralyzed man whose mind is remotely controlling an alien body is very similar to Poul Anderson's 1957 short story Call me Joe. In August 1996, Cameron announced that after completing Titanic, he would film Avatar, which would make use of "synthetic", or computer-generated, actors.[20] The project would cost $100 million and involve at least six actors in leading roles "who appear to be real but do not exist in the physical world".[21] Special effects house Digital Domain, with whom Cameron has a partnership, joined the project, which was supposed to begin production in the summer of 1997 for a 1999 release.[22] However, that was not to be, due to the special effects he wanted ran the budget up to $400 million, which made the film impossible to be made.[citation needed]

In June 2005, director Cameron was announced to be working on a project tentatively titled "Project 880", concurrently with another project, Battle Angel.[23] By December, Cameron said that he planned to film Battle Angel first for a summer 2007 release, and to film Project 880 for a 2009 release.[24] In February 2006, Cameron said he had switched goals for the two film projects – Project 880 was now scheduled for 2007 and Battle Angel for 2009. He indicated that the release of Project 880 would possibly be delayed until 2008.[25] Later that February, Cameron revealed that Project 880 was "a retooled version of Avatar", a film that he had tried to make years earlier,[26] citing the technological advances in the creation of the computer-generated characters Gollum, King Kong and Davy Jones.[5] Cameron had chosen Avatar over Battle Angel after completing a five-day camera test in the previous year.[27]

Cameron's early scriptment for Avatar had circulated on the Internet for years. When the project was re-announced, copies were subsequently removed from websites.[28] In June 2006, Cameron said that if Avatar was successful, he hoped to make two sequels to the film.[29]

Wikinews has related news:

From January to April 2006, Cameron worked on the script. Working with Paul Frommer, linguist and Director of the Center for Management Communication at USC, he developed a whole language and culture for the Na'vi, the indigenous race on Pandora.[5] In July, Cameron announced that he would film Avatar for a summer 2008 release and planned to begin principal photography with an established cast by February 2007.[30] The following August, the visual effects studio Weta Digital signed on to help Cameron produce Avatar.[31] Stan Winston, who had collaborated with Cameron in the past, joined Avatar to help with the film's designs.[32] In September 2006, Cameron was announced to be using his own Reality Camera System to film in 3-D. The system would use two high-definition cameras in a single camera body to create depth perception.[33]

Themes

At Comic Con 2009, Cameron told attendees that he wanted to make "something that has this spoonful of sugar of all the action and the adventure and all that, which thrills me anyway as a fan, but also wanting to do something that has a conscience, that maybe in the enjoying of it makes you think a little bit about the way you interact with nature and your fellow man."[34] He added that "the Na'vi represent something that is our higher selves, or our aspirational selves, what we would like to think we are," and "the humans in the film, even though there are some good ones salted in, represent what we know to be the parts of ourselves that are trashing our world and maybe condemning ourselves to a grim future."[34]

Filming and effects

It's this form of pure creation where if you want to move a tree or a mountain or the sky or change the time of day, you have complete control over the elements.

James Cameron on virtual filmmaking[35]

In December 2006, Cameron explained that the delay in producing the film since the 1990s had been to wait until the technology necessary to create his project was advanced enough. The director planned to create photo-realistic computer-generated characters by using motion capture animation technology, on which he had been doing work for the past 14 months. Unlike previous performance capture systems, where the digital environment is added after the actors' motions have been captured, Cameron's new virtual camera allows him to observe directly on a monitor how the actors' virtual counterparts interact with the movie's digital world in real time and adjust and direct the scenes just as if shooting live action; "It’s like a big, powerful game engine. If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can. I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature and go through it on a 50 to 1 scale."[36] Cameron planned to continue developing the special effects for Avatar, which he hoped would be released in summer 2009. He also gave fellow directors Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson a chance to test the new technology.[37] Spielberg and George Lucas were also able to visit the set to watch Cameron direct with the equipment.[19]

Other technological innovations include a performance-capture stage, called The Volume, which is six times larger than previously used and an improved method of capturing facial expressions. The tool is a small individually made skull cap with a tiny camera attached to it, located in front of the actors' face which collects information about their facial expressions and eyes, which is then transmitted to the computers. This way, Cameron intends to transfer about 95% of the actors' performances to their digital counterparts. Besides a real time virtual world, the team is also experimenting with a way of letting computer generated characters interact with real actors on a real, live-action set while shooting live action.[38]

Adobe's Creative Suite was used extensively in the pre and post production of the film.

In January 2007, Fox announced that the studio's Avatar would be filmed in 3D at 24 frames per second. Cameron described the film as a hybrid with a full live-action shoot in combination with computer-generated characters and live environments. "Ideally at the end of the day the audience has no idea which they’re looking at," Cameron said. The director indicated that he had already worked four months on nonprincipal scenes for the film. Principal photography began in April 2007,[39] and was done around parts of Los Angeles as well as New Zealand. The live action is shot with the proprietary Fusion digital 3-D camera system developed by Cameron and Vince Pace. According to Cameron, the film will be composed of 60% computer-generated elements and 40% live action, as well as traditional miniatures.[40] The performance-capture photography would last 31 days at the Hughes Aircraft stage in Playa Vista, Los Angeles, California.[27][41] In October, Cameron was scheduled to shoot live-action in New Zealand[14] for another 31 days.[5]

To create the human mining colony on Pandora, production designers visited the Noble Clyde Boudreaux drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico during June 2007. They photographed, measured and filmed every aspect of the rig, which will be replicated on-screen with photorealistic CGI.[42] Around 1000 people worked on the production.[41]

Music

Composer James Horner will score the film, his third collaboration with Cameron after Aliens and Titanic.[43] Horner recorded parts of the score with a small chorus singing in the alien language Na'vi in March 2008.[44] He is also working with Wanda Bryant, an ethnomusicologist, to create a music culture for the alien race.[45] The first scoring sessions were planned to take place in the Spring of 2009.[46]

Release

Avatar was originally set for release on May 22, 2009 during filming,[47] but the film was pushed back to December 18, 2009. This was done to allow more post-production time, and to also give more time for theaters worldwide to install 3D projectors.[48] The film's aspect ratio will be 16:9, but a CinemaScope format will be extracted for 2D screenings.[49] Avatar will also be released in IMAX 3D.[50] The first photo of the film was released on 14 August 2009[51], and Empire Magazine will release exclusive images from the film in its October issue.[52]

Marketing

Cameron chose Ubisoft to create an Avatar game for the film in 2007. The filmmakers and game developers collaborated heavily, and Cameron decided to include some of Ubisoft's vehicle and creature designs into the film.[53] A Mattel toy line will debut in November 2009. Each figure, creature, or vehicle will come with a 3D tag which can be scanned by a webcam, a technology also known as augmented reality, allowing consumers to unlock content about the Avatar universe on their computers.[54]

Cameron, producer Jon Landau, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, and Sigourney Weaver appeared at a panel, moderated by Tom Rothman, at the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con on July 23. 25 minutes of footage was screened[55] in Dolby 3D.[56] Weaver and Cameron appeared at additional panels to promote the film, speaking on the 23rd[57] and 24th[58] respectively. James Cameron announced at the Comic-Con Avatar Panel that August 21 will be 'Avatar Day'. On this day the trailer for the film was released in all theatrical formats. The official game trailer and toy line of the film were also unveiled on this day.[59] Avatar will be the first film to feature the new 20th Century Fox logo, which will be animated by Ice Age creator, Blue Sky Studios, and first used in the trailer of the film.

The 129-second trailer was released online on August 20, 2009 to mixed reviews. The new 210-second trailer was premiered in theatres with Amelia, Astro Boy, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant and Saw VI on October 23, 2009, and then premiered online on Yahoo! on October 29, 2009. Like the teaser trailer, the new trailer starts with the new 20th Century Fox logo.[60][61] An extended version in IMAX 3D received overwhelming positive reviews.[62] The Hollywood Reporter said that audience expectations were coloured by "the [same] establishment skepticism that preceded Titanic" and suggested the showing reflected the desire for original storytelling.[63][64] The teaser-trailer has reached the reputation of among the most viewed ones in the history of the filming marketing, reaching the 1st place of all trailers viewed on Apple.com with 4 million views.[65]

References

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