Avatar”, the costliest ever produced film written and directed by James Cameron has been

released world wide.  As the title denotes it is a a “3-D representation of a real person in a
virtualized world “. A number of reviews on this film are already  available on tabloids  blogs
and movie review sites. Avatar has already termed as a must see movie. In this juncture it is
interesting to go through the technology behind this great movie.

 The film is released in 2D, 3D and IMax 3D (Selected theaters only). 2D and 3D are
familiar words but what is IMAx 3D? Imax means Image MAXimum which is  a
production standard developed by Canada’s IMax Corporation. A standard IMAX screen
is 22 meters (72 ft) wide and 16.1 meters (53 ft) high, but can vary.The world’s largest
cinema screen and IMAX screen is the LG IMAX theater in Darling Harbor, Sydney. It is
29.42m (approximately 8 stories) high by 35.73m wide — covering an area of more than
1,015 square metres. Only a few hundred IMAX theaters are in world wide. About 50%
of IMAX theaters are located in US. To know more about IMAX visit Official IMAX
site.
 The old-fashioned 3D cinematography – the sort where your glasses had red and green
coloured lenses – a pair of closely-aligned images with different tints gave the impression
of depth by fooling the eyes. Avatar takes things a step further by using both computer
generated 3D imagery and advanced stereoscopic filming methods to create the illusion
of reality.
 The main technology used in this film is “Motion capture animation” technology which
creates computerized images from real human action. Motion capture for computer
character animation involves the mapping of human motion onto the motion of a
computer character. The mapping can be direct, such as human arm motion controlling a
character’s arm motion, or indirect, such as human hand and finger patterns controlling a
character’s skin color or emotional state.
 For this Cameron, used a self developed advanced filming rig consists of a number of
stereoscopic cameras that each use a pair of lenses built to mimic human eyes –
positioned close together and able to move a little in order to focus on objects that are
nearby or far away. That allows the cinematographer to capture two images
simultaneously, which align perfectly with and provide the illusion of depth.
 The scenes were filmed using a “virtual” camera and a real time computer manipulated
3D views were recorded.
 The viewing part at theater is still traditional as in the case of  a typical 3D movie, which
requires but nothing more to disappoint. It is a vast improvement on the sometimes
headache-inducing techniques that relied on cardboard cutout glasses with red and green
lenses and rose and fell in popularity in the 1950s.
 But instead of old fashioned coloured lenses, modern 3D films require audiences to wear
polarised glasses – where each lens lets through a slightly different kind of light. This
means that your left eye and right eye can see different images shown simultaneously on
the screen – and not only are they less headache inducing than in the past,they look much
more like ordinary specs too.
"We're going to blow you to the back wall of the theatre in a way you haven't seen for a long
time," Cameron told the Hollywood Reporter about his new epic SF movie "Avatar", which
recently started filming in Wellington, New Zealand."My goal is to rekindle those amazing
mystical moments my generation felt when we first saw '2001: A Space Odyssey,' or the next
generation's 'Star Wars.' It took me 10 years to find something hard enough to be
interesting."The $US200 million Avatar is about a band of humans struggling against a distant
planet's indigenous inhabitants and will feature 12 computer-generated characters.Using a new
digital 3D format, Avatar and the technology behind it could revolutionise the industry, making
2D films seem as outdated as silent films. Cameron is pushing the technology to its limits while
simultaneously plugging the benefits of 3D with evangelical fervour. Film heavyweights such as
Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson have already become enthusiastic converts, teaming up to
create a 3D trilogy based on the Belgian book series The Adventures of Tin Tin.A new FUSION
digital 3D camera system developed by Cameron and Vince Pace is being used for Avatar's live
action shots, allowing Cameron to see the virtual characters as he is filming. Cameron will be
able to direct his virtual creations as if they are real people on a live action set, rather than
making adjustments in postproduction."These are supposed to be real people, real characters,"
said Cameron. "If we can pull it off, Avatar will be the coolest film ever made. If not, we'll have
egg on our face."Weta Digital, the company responsible for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings
trilogy, is supervising the special effects. Weta has helped create a motion capture head rig that
maps facial expressions. In the past, actors had to apply hundreds of tiny dots to their faces for
the camera to track, a time consuming and sometimes frustrating process.Some filming has
already been completed in Hawaii and Los Angeles, while an additional 31 days of live
photography will be carried out on Weta's soundstages."It's controllable. No weather conditions.
No water on this one," said Cameron in the Hollywood Reporter. His problems with water and
budget blowouts on the set of Titanic are legendary.An article in Wired Magazine suggests that
after more than 50 years after its first run "3D is staging a comeback" and is now "the biggest
gun yet in Hollywood's growing arsenal of F/X". Most of the major studios have two or three 3D
movies already in production.A 3D version of Beowulf starring Angelina Jolie will test the
waters in November, showing on a record 1,000 3D screens across the US."It will become
another consumer choice, like premium or regular gas," Cameron said when asked about the
potential of 3D cinema by Business Week. "The premium experience of 3D will be the preferred
viewing experience for action, animated, fantasy, and science fiction films."After 11 Academy
Awards and the all time box office record for Titanic, Cameron has a lot of clout in Hollywood
and has always been at the cutting edge, as he convincingly demonstrated with Aliens and
especially Terminator 2. Even so, 3D faces serious obstacles before it can become the viewing
experience of choice for the general public. The lack of 3D theatres worldwide and a public
unused to sticking a pair of goggles over their eyes are two of the biggest. The rapid uptake of
larger and higher definition plasma and LCD screens also makes it harder to persuade people to
leave their living rooms.I remember being underwhelmed by my first experience with 3D in an
IMAX cinema. I especially remember a friend struggling to fit a pair of glasses under 3D
goggles. Then there was the nausea, dizziness, and headaches people experienced in the early
days, all of which didn't generate positive feedback.Optimistically, one of the original production
announcements from 20th Century Fox stated that "with the continued roll-out of digital
projection systems, the studios and filmmakers anticipate that digital 3D theatres will be
widespread by the film's summer 2009 release".
I can't see it happening that quickly myself. However, there's no better Director to push the 3D
envelope. If Cameron's Avatar can spark the imagination of the film going public, perhaps like
2001 and Star Wars before it, Avatar can set a standard that Directors want to imitate and the
film going public crave. All it really takes is that one iconic film. Maybe 3D's day is here at last?
James Cameron's Avatar is now officially the top grossing movie of all time eclipsing Titanic
(also by James Cameron). Probably the main reason of its huge success is the use of innovative
filmmaking technology like its development of 3D viewing and stereoscopic filmmaking with
cameras that were specially designed for the movie's production. It's amazing that Cameron
wrote the scriptment for the film more than 15 years ago, but the technology available at that
moment was very limited to portray his vision of the film, a major cause of the long delay of its
release.I've seen Avatar in 3D and I must say that it's the best movie since Star Wars. If you are
like me who are curious to know how this stunning movie was made, here a quick look at some
of the technology behind this masterpiece: * Linux's silent but important roleWeta Digital,
the visual effects company that gave life to the flora and fauna on Pandora, uses Linux and other
Linux-based software to achieve all those cutting edge graphics. It utilizes one of the world's
largest Linux clusters (ranked #193 amongst the top 500 supercomputers) for film rendering,
with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as their OS. The CGI are created using 64-bit Linux-
based software for painting textures and 3D modeling.
* Building the stageThere were more than 90 cameras (configured in a grid) that hang around
the perimeter of a sound stage. Later on, a computer replaces the studio walls, the floor and the
ceiling with digitally rendered three-dimensional environments and structures. * The 3-D Fusion
Camera SystemThe 3-D Fusion Camera System uses two high-definition cameras in a single
camera body to create depth perception. The line of sight of the lenses can be adjusted so that
they can be angled closer together to focus on nearby objects, or farther apart for those in the
distance, just as your eyes do.The virtual cameraCameron made use of his very own virtual
camera system, a new way of directing motion-capture filmmaking. According to him, "It's like a
big, powerful game engine. The system displays an augmented reality on a monitor, placing the
actor's virtual counterparts into their digital surroundings in real time, allowing the director to
adjust and direct scenes just as if shooting live action.* Motion-captureThey use a motion-
capture stage (dubbed as "The Volume") six times larger than any previously used, and an
improved method of capturing facial expressions, enabling full performance capture. Actors
wore individually made skull-caps fitted with a tiny camera placed in front of the actors' faces.
The information gathered from their facial expressions and eyes is then transmitted to computers.
According to Cameron, the method made it possible for the filmmakers to transfer 100% of the
actors' physical performances to their digital counterparts.* The Visual effects
Creating the virtual world of Pandora required over a petabyte of digital storage (Transformers
"Revenge of the Fallen" needed about 140 terabytes). The final footage for Avatar occupied
17.28 gigabytes of storage per minute. To help finish preparing the special effects sequences on
time, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) was brought in, working alongside Weta Digital to create
the battle sequences.

This weekend, millions of people will flock to IMAX theaters and cinemas around the world, 3-
D glasses eagerly perched, in anticipation of James Cameron’s masterpiece Avatar, a cinematic
œuvre fifteen years in the making. Underscoring this two and a half our epic lie unparalleled
technological, scientific and artistic achievements, including the invention of a novel 3-D film
camera, the complete biological and linguistic realization of a virtual world, and flawlessly
integrated art direction and conceptual renderings. Many people’s post-viewing reaction will be,
“How did they do that?!” ScriptPhD.com is proud to present a special Avatar preview that
includes behind-the-scenes secrets and a review of the must-own companion design book The
Art of Avatar. Before you go see the movie, get to know it.Fresh off of astronomical success with
Titanic—11 Oscars and the highest-grossing revenue of all time—James Cameron could have
done anything. He was King of the World, remember? Any film, any project, the sky was the
limit. Instead, he disappeared, only to reemerge in 2005 to propose a new big-budget blockbuster
to 20th Century Fox. They funded a $10 million 5-minute prototype for Avatar, but hesitated
green-lighting full production, citing the 153-page script (first conceived in 1995), ambitious
new video technology, and a story producers feared would alienate audiences. Only when Disney
expressed interest in the film did they give Cameron a full go-ahead. The result is a movie with a
final budget of over $230 million that required four years’ of full-time work to complete. Avatar
is a sweeping epic that takes place on fictitious Pandora, a distant moon in the Alpha Centauri-A
star system that has been colonized by humans in the year 2154. Discovery of an abundant
precious ore, unobtanium, that might solve Earth’s energy crisis leads corporate and military
interests to infiltrate the ranks of a native population of humanoids called the Na’avi. Because of
a toxic atmosphere, human “drivers” link their consciousness to genetically engineered avatar
models—50% human DNA, 50% Na’avi DNA. Jake Sully, a paraplegic ex-Marine, has been
called to take his dead brother’s place for scientific exploration of Pandora’s ecosystem,
biosphere and indigenous peoples. Inadvertently enveloped into learning the Na’avi culture and
ways, Jake soon falls in love with the Princess Neytari and becomes caught in a battle between
his own people and the virtual world he has adopted. Avatar, however, transcends whatever story
or theme one imagines to define it. It is a pinnacle of scientific and technological innovation, an
ode to its filmmaker’s vast travels (earthly and underwater) and intergalactic fascinations, and a
harbinger of a filmmaking style that will redefine 21st Century cinema. “This film integrates my
life’s achievements,” Cameron said in a New Yorker profile earlier this fall. “It’s the most
complicated stuff anyone’s ever done.”The Technology•Performance Capture
Motion capture and computer-generated imagery (CGI) are not new to film. Motion capture (or
green screen technology) was first introduced by Cameron for Total Recall, with the first CGI
human movements added later for Terminator 2. It is, however, inherently limiting to the size
and proportions of the human body, in particular the actor of the character being portrayed. The
eyes can’t be moved, for example, and makeup often inhibits actor performance. CGI is
traditionally done by placing reflective markers all over an actor’s face and body, which are then
interpreted by computer technology to create digitized expressions for the CG character.
However, the gulf between human and CG expression, referred to as the “uncanny valley”, is
often quite noticeable. To bridge the two and create the first truly seamless hybridized CGI,
Cameron and his team developed a new “image-based facial performance capture”, requiring the
actors to wear special headgear rig equipped with a camera. With cameras placed just inches
from their face, actors’ every muscle contraction or pupil dilation was captured and digitized,
creating astounding emotional authenticity to their Na’avi avatar counterparts. “If Madonna can
be bouncing around with a microphone in her face and give a great performance,” Producer Jon
Landau said in a New York Times interview, “we thought, ‘Let’s replace that microphone with a
video camera.’ That video camera stays with the actor while we’re capturing the performance,
and while we don’t use that image itself, we give it to the visual-effects company and they render
it in a frame-by frame, almost pore-by-pore level.” The scope of clarity and precision of the
head-rig allowed for a much larger capture environment than ever before, a bare stage called the
“Volume”, six times larger than any previous capture environment.•Digital animation
State-of-the-art animation renderings for Avatar were done by Peter Jackson’s New Zealand-based
digital-effects studio Weta Digital. A team of talented artists transferred basic renderings (more on this
below) into photo-real images, particularly using new breakthroughs in lighting, shading, and rendering.
“I’ve seen people looking at Avatar shots, being convinced they are somehow looking at actors in
makeup,” Jackson says. The realism was extended to each leaf, tree, plant and rock, which were
rendered in WETA computers. Additionally, a team of artists, headed by Academy Award winner Richard
Taylor, designed the props and weapons for the Na’avi and humans. All of this digital design took over
one year to complete and took up over a petabyte, one thousand terabytes, of hard drive space!
Stereoscopic 3D Fusion Camera System:As far back as ten years ago, James Cameron had wanted to
develop a 3D camera. At that time, the concerted goal was to use it to shoot a gritty Mars movie that
would act as an emblem for space exploration (Cameron is on the advisory board of NASA). At this time,
stereoscopic 3D cameras were the size of washing machines and weighed 450 pounds. The challenge
issued to production partner Vince Pace was to develop a lightweight, quiet camera capable of shooting
in both 2D and 3D. The result of over seven years of hard work was the groundbreaking new Fusion
Camera System, the world’s most advanced 3D camera. It facilitated an almost flawless merger between
live action scenes and CG scenes. Most of the live-action scenes were shot in Wellington, New Zealand
on sets constructed by a massive team of 150 contractors. Live-action sets included the link rooms
(where the humans transported to their Na’avi avatars, the Bio-Lab, the Ops Center military operations
area, and the Armor Bay military stronghold, which housed all the weapons and transport units.•Virtual
Camera/Simul-Cam:Tying together the 3D and CG technology of visualizing the film were two new
Cameron intermediary inventions: the virtual camera and the simul-cam. The virtual camera, used by
Cameron in the Volume motion capture stage, wasn’t actually a camera at all. Looking like a video game
controller, it simulated a camera that was fed CG images by supercomputers surrounding the Volume.
This allowed amplification of each small adjustment on the virtual production stage, from camera
movement to actor interaction, to gauge the overall effect on the final big-screen cut. The simul-cam
fed, in integrated real-time, CG characters and environments into the live action Fusion 3D camera
eyepiece, allowing Cameron to direct virtual scenes on Pandora the same way he would a live-action
scene.The Language:Not satisfied with merely creating an otherworldly planet and its native beings from
scratch, James Cameron set about equipping the Na’avi humanoid tribe with a language of their own.
Audiences will be delighted in the authenticity—all communication on Pandora is shown through
subtitles befitting a foreign film. Ever the mindful scientist, Cameron hired USC professor and linguist Dr.
Paul Frommer to engineer the dialect from scratch, resulting in a respectable, self-sufficient vocabulary
of about a thousand words bound by a consistent sound system, grammar, orthography, and syntax. In
an extensive interview with Vanity Fair, Dr. Frommer says that Cameron approached him as far back as
2005, when Avatar was going by a code name of Project 880. As with every other aspect of this film,
Cameron’s genius micromanagement provided Dr. Frommer with the basics of the sound and structure
he was looking for. “I didn’t start from absolute ground zero,” said Frommer, “Because James Cameron
had come up with, in the early script, maybe 30 words. Most of them were character names, but there
were a couple of names of animals. So at that point I had a sense of some of the sounds that he had in
his ear and it reminded me a little bit of some Polynesian languages.”In addition to painstakingly
working on the syntax for over five years, which he compiled into a pamphlet entitled Speak Na’avi, Dr.
Frommer worked closely on-set with Avatar actors to ensure proper pronunciation and phonetic
differences between native Na’avi speakers, and their human avatar contrasts. Beyond the film, Dr.
Frommer is not done developing Na’avi, in the hopes that it might take off like Klingon did post-Star
Trek. “I’m still working and I hope that the language will have a life of its own,” the professor said in an
interview with the Los Angeles Times. “For one thing, I’m hoping there will be prequels and sequels to
the film, which means more language will be needed.
Stereoscopic 3D Fusion Camera System:For over a decade, James Cameron has been
fascinated with the prospect of using 3D in his movies. His first aspiration for the technology
was to create a movie about Mars exploration that would symbolize NASA’s Mars ambitions. At
the time, stereoscopic 3D camera systems were the size of refrigerators and could weigh close to
500 pounds.Cameron issued a challenge to one of his partners, Vince Pace: Develop a quiet,
lightweight 3D camera for a movie I want to do. That was seven years ago, and the result is
stunning – the new Fusion Camera System. Considered the most advanced camera system ever
designed, it was used to “run the stitches” between live action scenes and computer generated
scenes.Performance Capture:Computer generated imagery (CGI) was used extensively in
Avatar. CGI was first introduced on the big screen for background scenery in Cameron’s 1990’s
summer blockbuster, Total Recall. Using CGI to graphically enhance human movements was
trickier, however, and was first used a year later in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.For Avatar,
though, Cameron wanted something more than what CGI could provide. Under Cameron’s
direction, his team developed a new technique named “image-based facial performance capture”,
which required the actors to wear special headgear equipped with a camera. The video of the
actor’s face is rendered at an almost pore-by-pore level, and the result was the astonishing
emotional authenticity displayed by the Na’avi characters.Digital animation:Avatar’s animation
renderings were provided by Peter Jackson’s digital-effects studio Weta Digital. A large team of
artists worked nonstop to transfer the renderings to photo-realistic images using innovative
techniques in lighting, shading, and rendering. No detail was left out –Jackson’s computers
rendered rock, tree and leaf individually. The entire process took over a year to complete and
over a petabyte (one thousand terabytes) of hard drive space.Virtual Camera/Simul-Cam:Two
other new Cameron inventions, the Virtual Camera and the Simul-Cam, combined the CGI and
3D technologies for Avatar. The simul-cam integrated CGI based characters and environments
into the Fusion eyepiece, enabling Cameron to virtually direct CGI scenes just as we would a
live action scene.
The virtual camera is not so much a camera as a controller. Cameron used it to simulate a camera
that was fed CGI data by the supercomputers, thereby allowing him to judge the overall effect on
the final cut.Avatar cost $430 million to produce and market. It launched last week with an
estimated $232.2 million in worldwide ticket sales, making it the largest grossing debut ever for
a movie that wasn't a sequel.