Avatar James Cameron

Origins

In 1994,[12] director James Cameron wrote an 80-page treatment for Avatar, drawing inspiration from "every single science fiction book" he had read in his childhood as well as from adventure novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard.[11] Parts of the movie also came to him in a dream when he was 19 years old. He dreamed about a bioluminescent forest with fiber-optic trees, fan lizards, a river with bioluminescent particles and a purple moss that would light up when someone stepped on it. When he woke up he made a drawing of the scene and later used it in the movie.[57] In August 1996, Cameron announced that after completing Titanic, he would film Avatar, which would make use of synthetic, or computer-generated, actors.[14] 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".[58] Visual effects house Digital Domain, with whom Cameron has a partnership, joined the project, which was supposed to begin production in mid-1997 for a 1999 release.[13] However, Cameron felt that the technology had not caught up with the story and vision that he intended to tell. He decided to concentrate on making documentaries and refining the technology for the next few years. It was revealed in a Bloomberg BusinessWeek cover story that 20th Century Fox had fronted $10 million to Cameron to film a proof-of-concept clip for Avatar, which he showed to Fox executives in October 2005.[59]

In February 2006, Cameron revealed that his film Project 880 was "a retooled version of Avatar", a film that he had tried to make years earlier,[60] citing the technological advances in the creation of the computer-generated characters Gollum, King Kong, and Davy Jones.[11] Cameron had chosen Avatar over his project Battle Angel after completing a five-day camera test in the previous year.[61]

Development

From January to April 2006, Cameron worked on the script and developed a culture for the film's aliens, the Na'vi. Their language was created by Paul Frommer, a linguist at USC.[11] The Na'vi language has a lexicon of about 1000 words, with some 30 added by Cameron. The tongue's phonemes include ejective consonants (such as the "kx" in "skxawng") that are found in Amharic, and the initial "ng" that Cameron may have taken from Te Reo Māori.[16] Actress Sigourney Weaver and the film's set designers met with Jodie S. Holt, professor of plant physiology at University of California, Riverside, to learn about the methods used by botanists to study and sample plants, and to discuss ways to explain the communication between Pandora's organisms depicted in the film.[62]

From 2005 to 2007, Cameron worked with a handful of designers, including famed fantasy illustrator Wayne Barlowe and renowned concept artist Jordu Schell, to shape the design of the Na'vi with paintings and physical sculptures when Cameron felt that 3-D brush renderings were not capturing his vision,[63] often working together in the kitchen of Cameron's Malibu home.[64] In July 2006, Cameron announced that he would film Avatar for a mid-2008 release and planned to begin principal photography with an established cast by February 2007.[65] The following August, the visual effects studio Weta Digital signed on to help Cameron produce Avatar.[66] Stan Winston, who had collaborated with Cameron in the past, joined Avatar to help with the film's designs.[67] Production design for the film took several years. The film had two different production designers, and two separate art departments, one of which focused on the flora and fauna of Pandora, and another that created human machines and human factors.[68] 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.[69]

While these preparations were underway, Fox kept wavering in its commitment to Avatar because of its painful experience with cost overruns and delays on Cameron's previous picture, Titanic. During the production of Titanic, Cameron rewrote the script to streamline the plot by combining several characters' roles and offered to cut his fee if the film were a commercial disappointment.[59] Cameron installed a traffic light with the amber signal lit outside of co-producer Jon Landau's office to represent the film's uncertain future.[59] In mid-2006, Fox told Cameron "in no uncertain terms that they were passing on this film," so he began shopping it around to other studios and approached Walt Disney Studios, showing his proof of concept to then chairman Dick Cook.[59] However, when Disney attempted to take over, Fox exercised its right of first refusal.[59] In October 2006, Fox finally agreed to commit to making Avatar after Ingenious Media agreed to back the film, which reduced Fox's financial exposure to less than half of the film's official $237 million budget.[59] After Fox accepted Avatar, one skeptical Fox executive shook his head and told Cameron and Landau, "I don't know if we're crazier for letting you do this, or if you're crazier for thinking you can do this ..."[70]

In December 2006, Cameron described Avatar as "a futuristic tale set on a planet 200 years hence ... an old-fashioned jungle adventure with an environmental conscience [that] aspires to a mythic level of storytelling".[72] The January 2007 press release described the film as "an emotional journey of redemption and revolution" and said the story is of "a wounded former Marine, thrust unwillingly into an effort to settle and exploit an exotic planet rich in biodiversity, who eventually crosses over to lead the indigenous race in a battle for survival". The story would be of an entire world complete with an ecosystem of phantasmagorical plants and creatures, and native people with a rich culture and language.[45]

Estimates put the cost of the film at about $280–310 million to produce and an estimated $150 million for marketing, noting that about $30 million in tax credits would lessen the financial impact on the studio and its financiers.[17][18][19] A studio spokesperson said that the budget was "$237 million, with $150 million for promotion, end of story."[4]

Filming

Principal photography for Avatar began in April 2007 in Los Angeles and Wellington. 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.[73] The live action was shot with a modified version of the proprietary digital 3-D Fusion Camera System, developed by Cameron and Vince Pace.[74] In January 2007, Fox had announced that 3-D filming for Avatar would be done at 24 frames per second despite Cameron's strong opinion that a 3-D film requires higher frame rate to make strobing less noticeable.[75] According to Cameron, the film is composed of 60% computer-generated elements and 40% live action, as well as traditional miniatures.[76]

Motion-capture photography lasted 31 days at the Hughes Aircraft stage in Playa Vista in Los Angeles.[61][77] Live action photography began in October 2007 at Stone Street Studios in Wellington and was scheduled to last 31 days.[78] More than a thousand people worked on the production.[77] In preparation of the filming sequences, all of the actors underwent professional training specific to their characters such as archery, horseback riding, firearm use, and hand-to-hand combat. They received language and dialect training in the Na'vi language created for the film.[79] Before shooting the film, Cameron also sent the cast to the Hawaiian tropical rainforests[80] to get a feel for a rainforest setting before shooting on the soundstage.[79]

During filming, Cameron made use of his virtual camera system, a new way of directing motion-capture filmmaking. The system shows the actors' virtual counterparts in their digital surroundings in real time, allowing the director to adjust and direct scenes just as if shooting live action. According to Cameron, "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."[81] Using conventional techniques, the complete virtual world cannot be seen until the motion-capture of the actors is complete. Cameron said this process does not diminish the value or importance of acting. On the contrary, because there is no need for repeated camera and lighting setups, costume fittings and make-up touch-ups, scenes do not need to be interrupted repeatedly.[82] Cameron described the system as a "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".[83]

Cameron gave fellow directors Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson a chance to test the new technology.[72] Spielberg said, "I like to think of it as digital makeup, not augmented animation ... Motion capture brings the director back to a kind of intimacy that actors and directors only know when they're working in live theater."[82] Spielberg and George Lucas were also able to visit the set to watch Cameron direct with the equipment.[84]

To film the shots where CGI interacts with live action, a unique camera referred to as a "simulcam" was used, a merger of the 3-D fusion camera and the virtual camera systems. While filming live action in real time with the simulcam, the CGI images captured with the virtual camera or designed from scratch, are superimposed over the live action images as in augmented reality and shown on a small monitor, making it possible for the director to instruct the actors how to relate to the virtual material in the scene.[79]

Due to Cameron's personal convictions about climate change, he allowed only plant-based (vegan) food to be served on set.[85]

Visual effects

A number of innovative visual effects techniques were used during production. According to Cameron, work on the film had been delayed since the 1990s to allow the techniques to reach the necessary degree of advancement to adequately portray his vision of the film.[13][14] The director planned to make use of photorealistic computer-generated characters, created using new motion capture animation technologies he had been developing in the 14 months leading up to December 2006.[81]

Innovations include a new system for lighting massive areas like Pandora's jungle,[87] a motion-capture stage or "volume" six times larger than any previously used, and an improved method of capturing facial expressions, enabling full performance capture. To achieve the face capturing, actors wore individually made skull caps fitted with a tiny camera positioned in front of the actors' faces; the information collected about their facial expressions and eyes is then transmitted to computers.[88] According to Cameron, the method allows the filmmakers to transfer 100% of the actors' physical performances to their digital counterparts.[89] Besides the performance capture data which were transferred directly to the computers, numerous reference cameras gave the digital artists multiple angles of each performance.[90] A technically challenging scene was near the end of the film when the computer-generated Neytiri held the live action Jake in human form, and attention was given to the details of the shadows and reflected light between them.[91]

The lead visual effects company was Weta Digital in Wellington, at one point employing 900 people to work on the film.[92] Because of the huge amount of data which needed to be stored, cataloged and available for everybody involved, even on the other side of the world, a new cloud computing and Digital Asset Management (DAM) system named Gaia was created by Microsoft especially for Avatar, which allowed the crews to keep track of and coordinate all stages in the digital processing.[93] To render Avatar, Weta used a 930 m2 (10,000 sq ft) server farm making use of 4,000 Hewlett-Packard servers with 35,000 processor cores with 104 terabytes of RAM and three petabytes of network area storage running Ubuntu Linux, Grid Engine cluster manager, and 2 of the animation software and managers, Pixar's RenderMan and Pixar's Alfred queue management system.[94][95][96][97] The render farm occupies the 193rd to 197th spots in the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. A new texturing and paint software system, called Mari, was developed by The Foundry in cooperation with Weta.[98][99] Creating the Na'vi characters and the virtual world of Pandora required over a petabyte of digital storage,[100] and each minute of the final footage for Avatar occupies 17.28 gigabytes of storage.[101] It would often take the computer several hours to render a single frame of the film.[102] To help finish preparing the special effects sequences on time, a number of other companies were brought on board, including Industrial Light & Magic, which worked alongside Weta Digital to create the battle sequences. ILM was responsible for the visual effects for many of the film's specialized vehicles and devised a new way to make CGI explosions.[103] Joe Letteri was the film's visual effects general supervisor.[104]

Music and soundtrack

Composer James Horner scored the film, his third collaboration with Cameron after Aliens and Titanic.[105] Horner recorded parts of the score with a small chorus singing in the alien language Na'vi in March 2008.[106] He also worked with Wanda Bryant, an ethnomusicologist, to create a music culture for the alien race.[107] The first scoring sessions were planned to take place in early 2009.[108] During production, Horner promised Cameron that he would not work on any other project except for Avatar and reportedly worked on the score from four in the morning until ten at night throughout the process. He stated in an interview, "Avatar has been the most difficult film I have worked on and the biggest job I have undertaken."[109] Horner composed the score as two different scores merged into one. He first created a score that reflected the Na'vi way of sound and then combined it with a separate "traditional" score to drive the film.[79] British singer Leona Lewis was chosen to sing the theme song for the film, called "I See You". An accompanying music video, directed by Jake Nava, premiered December 15, 2009, on MySpace.[110]