James Cameron’s New 3-D Epic Could Change Film Forever

Throughout this history, film-makers have continually experimented with different camera techniques and different types of cameras.

This item relating to Mr. Cameron appears to be another incremental step in this long process. It looks to be interesting and possibly intriguing.

What is being lost in the modern film innovations, however, is what I would call the essence of film-making, which is a play-acted script featuring real people but presented as human drama/comedy/satire/etc. using the recognized camera techniques that distinguish cinema from a live play - rapid cutting, point-of-view camera angles, etc. As things go increasingly digital, and become more and more subject to manipulation of images bearing less and less connection with our real world experiences, we get more and more a sense of watching a cartoon as opposed to real people. It is no coincidence that, in this context, many of the modern plots are drawn from cartoon sources (Batman, Spider Man, many others). As this emphasis on special effects has increased, what has become increasingly lost is the quality scripts (with their corresponding wit, drama, fantasy) that once could be taken for granted in quality film-making. The result is an increasingly artificial experience to which it becomes harder and harder to relate.

Over the centuries, it is the great stories that have moved us, from epic poems to the great novels and, yes, even to the cinema of old warhorses such as Gone with the Wind. Today, technology has become as much a substitute for story-telling as anything else. Yes, it constitutes progress in a real sense (incremental though it may be) but, insofar as it has detracted from inspiring story-telling by serving as a tin-hat means of attracting audiences without the need to develop a great story, it has brought a net loss. Just watch a silent movie like Sunrise (1927) and tell me that CGI and other gimmicks have brought a net improvement to what truly can be inspiring about film.

It is, of course, possible to combine great new technology with great stories but not when the technology itself is being featured as the primary attraction.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=991197

Oh well. Still glad to see that people get to read it. I was especially impressed by push in technology that Cameron has made. I had no idea he was behind a lot of the push to get 3D projectors installed in theaters and how much he did to influence the creation of the 3D cameras used in filming this and other movies. There are many technical accomplishments that have been made with this film that most people watching it will never know (or care) about.

I'm no film buff, but the cinematography of certain parts of the trailer reminds me of the same second-rate "Lets get a really wide shot of this big computer-generated battle scene" effects-for-the-sake-of-effects schlock that's been shoved down our throats for the past 10 years. The Na'vi look really cool. But every time I see a perfectly framed complete shot of a monster leaping out of some shrubs in slow-motion I want to throw a shoe. We get it. It looks cool and somewhat life-like. Now can you please show us something that's designed to evoke a response other than cooing in delight of your wonderful technical achievements?

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/11/ff_avatar_cameron/all/...

(I always hate clicking through pages 1-4 when you can just view all four pages at once.)

This is just an advert for a movie.

The real kicker (from studio and filmmaker's point of view) is how Cameron is employing 3d. On most films until now it's been a novelty, used to make a weapon or explosion seem to imperil the audience, or to abuse perspective for comic effect. Cameron's achievement is to integrate it tightly with the existing cinematic language of the lens.

Basically lenses can be 'wide' or (confusingly) 'long'. A wide-angle lens presents a wide field of view while exaggerating perspective, while a long lens isolates small detail and can reduce the sense depth. Obviously this is important for framing, but it can be used in other ways; if you wish to increase tension, shoot someone running towards the camera with a long lens. S/he will hardly seem to be moving forward at all, and as viewers we fear the character will be unable to reach their objective in time. Conversely, the same motion when shot with a wide lens will suggest rapid movement from background to foreground, giving us a sense of power an inevitability (or conversely, of weakness and impotence if a character is falling away from the camera). Obviously I'm just scratching the surface here, but the various distortions of perspective possible with different focal lengths are a big part of what gives cinema its dramatic power.

What Cameron has been doing with Avatar is to shoot in deep focus (no using the aperture and focus controls to blur out the background, a favorite technique for isolating the subject from the environment) but instead create depth by altering the angle between the two lenses dynamically, creating the illusion of a large space in which attention to depth is focused stereoscopically. Until now most 3d projects have kept the stereoscopic distance fixed, which yields the feeling of watching the story take place on a stage in front of one and occasionally having one of the props or actors protrude outwards toward the audience. By varying the angle between the lenses in the same fashion as our eyes, Cameron presents a far more immersive way of experiencing the third dimension.

Much of the skepticism towards Avatar trailers and so forth stems from the fact that the background is often fully in focus - a technique which has been used to great cinematic effect (eg in Citizen Kane) but which has fallen out of fashion over the years. In videogames, by contrast, such deep focus is common (since you don't know where the player will want to focus attention in advance, and also because simulating narrow depth of field dynamically is computationally expensive). This deep focus is necessary to provide a credible sense of depth with variable-angle stereoscopy (if we threw the background out of focus too much, the foreground characters would just seem to be floating in space), but when you see it projected in regular 2d it looks old-fashioned and videogame-y.

It's not the CG that looks weird; if you shot an ordinary scene with the same 3d technique it would look boring and flat in 2d (indeed, the difficulty of emphasizing depth by adjusting focus on a consumer video camera is a big part of what makes it 'look like video'). So the primary reason Avatar is a Big Deal for Hollywood is that Cameron seems to have succeeded in developing a 3d photographic technique that is much more compelling and realistic than the standard fixed-angle 3d which has been used until now, which actually emphasizes the separation of the audience from the action. And in order to fully appreciate this...yes, you'll need to go to the theater.

Cameron has also done other amazing things - being able to integrate the CG with the live action at production time (instead of imagining it and then integrating the two image sources over months or years of post-production work) is also a very big deal, but that's much more 'inside baseball' as the main beneficiaries are the filmmakers rather than the audience, although it will lead to better results insofar as it will make it easier for less skilled or funded production teams to produce convincing blends of real and artificial images. And there are a host of other technical innovations - there will be multiple books written for the professional market on how to improve a film by employing Cameron's techniques; indeed, I dearly wish Cameron himself would write a book (or several) on his approach to directing, since he is the master of staging and editing complex visual action - if you need proof of this, watch a long action sequence from Terminator 2 (or any of his other films actually) and then a similar action scene from Michael Bay or someone similar; he too has access to huge budgets and armies of technical professionals, but in films like Transformers audiences can literally lose track of what's going on, who's winning a battle etc.

But the bottom line is that Avatar will live (or die, but probably live) by virtue of the way Cameron leverages 3d to put the audience 'in' the visual story, which is a fundamentally different photographic technique from that employed up to now.

I could care less about whether actors find him difficult to work with, or what percentage of his work involves revolutionary technology. I am glad he is out there making his films. Even the bad ones are interesting.

Given Hollywoods history in recent years, I'm not to confident that Avatar will be such a good movie.

He showed his commitment by giving up a financial stake? It would have shown more commitment if he'd given up any flat fee in order to get a higher percentage of the profits.

Maybe health care just sucks that bad in the future?

(BTW, the link is worth visiting for a few other interesting scripts--for instance, a version of "I Am Legend". http://www.horrorlair.com/moviescripts_a_f.html has more)