While I generally agree, the dude (Cameron w/Sony) did 'invent' a new camera that has already changed film making. As far a Wired fluff pieces go, this one was bearable.
No. I'm a big fan of RED, and commend them to the study of anyone interested in hardware hacking to commercial ends, but what they (and others) are doing is making high-quality digital image acquisition affordable. The actual photography part is fundamentally the same as with any film camera.
Almost all 3d work made up to now has consisted of taking two good cameras and mounting them next to each other, then setting up the motors and lenses such that they operate perfectly in parallel. Cameron's key innovation is alter the viewing angle (interaxial distance) between the two lenses dynamically while preserving sufficiently good ergonomics to make it work on a set (rather than inside a lab). So this is a new approach to to the optical part of photography, rather than the recording substrate. Of course, this can and probably will be leveraged on behalf of Red camera users and others small enough to be mounted side-by-side on an adjustable platform.
It's highly interesting for the entire movie industry, because it's an experience you currently have to go to the cinemas to get, you can't get it from buying some cheap consumer electronics and downloading something off the internet.
If Cameron has made something that makes 3D integral to the cinema experience instead of just something that feels tacked-on and not necessary, that can definitely change cinema forever, whether we like it or not. :-)
It paints him as a sort of Steve Jobs figure, with a really incredible drive to create and succeed, often at the expense of all else.
> She wanted to get married, but Cameron, she says, was not interested in a conventional domestic life: “He used to say to me, ‘Anybody can be a father or a husband. There are only five people in the world who can do what I do, and I’m going for that.’ ”
> [...]
> Before beginning production on “The Abyss” (1989), the most ambitious underwater movie ever attempted, he went to see Leonard Goldberg, then the president of Fox, which was financing the film. “He said, ‘I want you to know one thing—once we embark on this adventure and I start to make this movie, the only way you’ll be able to stop me is to kill me,’ ” Goldberg told me. “You looked into those eyes and you knew he meant it.”
Looks like this 3-D camera he developed has been used in films before. Why didn't they change film forever? Do we expect to enter a new era where everyone uses James Cameron's insane attention to detail in order to make a headdress look realistic, or develop a new language and teach it to actors? The article smells of hype and seems to justify this long-delayed epic "to out-Lucas Lucas."
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?
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?
We live in a world where people know nothing about cinema except what they see on commercials during the Simpsons. When you make a trailer, you're convincing the masses. You expect cinephiles to ignore trailers anyway.
It's the ultimate amateur mistake to assume a movie trailer is worth anything. It's marketing, and what's more, it's dumb marketing for dumb people.
The sad part is that the trailer gives an impression of what I believe the movie is not at first glance. The title of the project would have been better if changed as well. The title seems like a kids movie and blue anoxeric smurfs do not seem like they would be enticing to adults; however, I really want to see this movie... not because of the trailer but because I like the idea of Cameron returning to what made his films special in the first place. Titanic was a terrible movie and should have been a dud. It was not enjoyable to watch for me, and it was the first and only movie I walked out on. (I returned around the time the boat started sinking.) However, Aliens, Terminator, etc. are some of my favorite movies. To see his talent is to compare his movies to their sequels by other directors. Terminator 3 was terrible. T4 was good, but it did not compare to T1 and T2. And Terminator 2 was one of the only sequels I believe that was actually better than the original. Anyway, I think this movie has promise but the marketing itself has been lacking. They should have focused on the epic aspects of the film in the marketing.
Titanic was a terrible movie and should have been a dud. It was not enjoyable to watch for me, and it was the first and only movie I walked out on.
Say what you will, but Titanic was the best thing that happened to my youth: every girl wanted to see it, over and over again, and no guy could stand it. Perfect.
Agreed. But in my personal experience, most films with generous amounts of realistic-looking CG end up sacrificing what makes films really fun to watch: an engaging story, realistic portrayal and cinematography that brings you into the film instead of sitting in front of it. The visuals are worthless if you can't make people feel something other than "ooh... aah..." and i'm (hopefully incorrectly) assuming this movie - with its highly-anticipated technical wizardry - will follow in the footsteps of its predecessors.
They are as deep down there as possible. Which can be a good thing if you take it as a sign that we're almost at the maximum.
Still seeing the trailers I'm not sure how I'm supposed to sympathise with them. Also the story doesn't seem overly interesting either. I guess we will see.
This is actually noted in much of the 'uncanny valley' predictions, in that the positive and negative effects are less severe. A static picture can look human enough to fool you, however a video doesn't take long before something clues you in and at 24fps you're likely to clue in fast.
However zombies don't look as horrifying in still pictures as they do in animation. Catching the bottom of the uncanny valley can have its benefit for directors as well.
Some of that is just an engineering resource problem. If you can bring yourself to watch Peter Jackson's awful King Kong remake, the giant ape looks incredibly good while creatures in the valley of the dinosaurs are dreadful...on the big screen I was able to spot that they'd been done by two different FX teams (CG/compositing geek here, so I'm abnormally fussy).
The blue dudes are very human-like, yet are not humans. Therefore, even if you saw them in real life, they would be in the "uncanny valley." The real uncanny valley only applies to attempted depictions of humans. Heck, a shorn chimpanzee is practically in the same uncanny valley as the blue dudes.
* The real uncanny valley only applies to attempted depictions of humans.*
In my experience the same reaction, though sometimes muted, applies to just about any living thing Hollywood attempts to computer generate. I can't remember having ever seen a convincing depiction of a dog, cat, or even insect for that matter.
It's entirely possible that an alien humanoid biological creature would appear to be obviously living to us in the same way as other non-human animals, and thus subject to the same "uncanny valley."
The uncanny valley can be used to good effect though: zombies for instance. It's very hard to make a zombie scary if you've got it too low on the uncanny valley that people can't get past going "aww it's so cute!"
I haven't got the creepy feeling I have from other attempts, so I'd likely put them on the upward exponential out of the uncanny valley. I believe this may be greatly helped by the fact they're not supposed to look human.
It's like the aliens in the new Star Trek, the absolute weirdest was the comedic throwback of the green chick. The lack of prosthetics to modify her made her feel so much weirder than any of the others.
The fact that people are going to be going into the movie seeing spaceships and humans rendered in CGI before they see any of the aliens may help the aliens out of the uncanny valley. After wading through Disney Land and finding one of the humanoid robots they don't appear as false as the highly realistic androids being made in Japan despite not being of as good craftsmanship, why? Well I just walked through a mile of talking humanoid mice, anything remotely human is now believable!
However something to point out: Capgras syndrome gives the sufferer this 'uncanny valley' effect to anyone the person knows, they'll believe the person has been replaced by a duplicate.
He gets a lot of bad press, but I find Cameron genuinely inspiring. His attention to detail and fanatical focus on storytelling is impressive. He bends the world to his will. Also the way he gets obsessed with things and pours himself into them with apparent little regard for what others think.
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.
As a sign of his commitment, Cameron agreed to give up his entire directing fee and any profit participation in the 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.
It's never too late to pull the plug on a movie that's expected to be a failure. He pulled out so the company was more likely to break even or profit and therefore more likely to actually distribute the movie.
The most fascinating part of this whole thing to me is having the chance to see the movie after having read the 'scriptment' over 5 years ago. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/5/8/73755/86297 provided the link, though I'm not finding the document online any longer.
The technology associated with film-making has evolved incrementally ever since its inception: from the 1890's Edison Kinetoscope shorts that could be watched by only one person at a time to the 2-reeler comedy shorts circa 1915 to D.W. Griffith's breakthrough with silent feature-length films in Birth of a Nation to the first talkies with 1927's The Jazz Singer to the introduction of color in select 1920's movies such as The Black Pirate (eventually evolving into beautiful technicolor productions) to Disney's feature animations in the 1930's to the first experimentation with 3-D in the 1950's with The Blue Lagoon and other gimmick films featuring knives and other assorted objects being hurled gratuitously at the audience to the widescreen film techniques of the 1950's featuring elongated landscapes that made one dizzy watching them to the modern digital special effects movies featuring CGI in a leading role.
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.
Big dumb blockbusters have a quality of their own. Big budgets & mass appeal can easily seem to demand a bland inoffensiveness, but so don't watch them if you're in the mood for a smarter movie. There are still a few out there. And calling out for a time when films were Quality just strikes me as convenient nostalgia, ignoring past crap.
I don't buy the argument that the past had a higher rate of quality scripts. To me, that position has always smacked of selective reporting combined with the old 'back in my day' argument.
The undeniably great stories of western civilization total a hundred or so works over the course of our history. So the works of any given decade or generation will always be found wanting in that comparison. It shows nothing.
If anything, the old studio system was designed to shovel out disposable content even more so than the current configuration.
Now I don't have a comprehensive study to support my position, but until commonly accepted wisdom has one for its stance, I disagree.
Your basic points are good ones with which I don't disagree (the studio system did turn out a lot of junk and classic story-telling does stand in a class by itself). Insofar as I implied otherwise in favor of what might have come across as a nostalgic view of the past, I stand corrected.
If I were to rephrase my basic point, I would say that (in my view) technology, however good, is less important to good film-making than are other creative elements such as good story-telling. Thus, if film producers have limited resources to devote to a project and pour most of them into expensive technology as opposed to paying for quality scripts, story lines can and do suffer, as do the films associated with them. I think that has happened a lot in recent years but will grant that it is subjective on my part (there are, of course, a good number of original, quality scripts around in today's movies, with Pixar's output coming to mind among others).
These days, the commonly accepted wisdom is that movies were always as bad as they are now, and anyone who says otherwise is just idealizing the past. I offer the following evidence that the quality of movies is not constant over time:
1939: Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Gone With The Wind, The Wizard Of Oz, Stagecoach, Ninotchka, Wuthering Heights
1940: Rebecca, Fantasia, His Girl Friday, The Grapes of Wrath, The Philadelphia Story, The Great Dictator
1941: Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels
Rather than relying on personal taste, I took these from various 'top 100' lists. I haven't seen all of them myself, but the ones I have seen are a mile apart from anything released this year, or any recent year.
I guess it depends on who you're talking to. I still keep hearing 'movies used to be better'.
And I never argued that quality was constant. I believe it's essentially random. So the existence of an aberrant concentration of quality isn't surprising to me. I'm sure you could find clusters of a few years where nothing of note came out as well.
IMDB reports that 2322 movies were released in 1939 alone, is it really surprising that there were a handful of good movies among them?
1980 for comparision, IMDB lists 6007 movies (8000+ if you include TV movies), and contains modern (popular) classics such as Stir Crazy, Superman II, Empire Strikes Back, Airplane!, The Blue Lagoon, Ordinary People, Urban Cowboy. The Shining, Caddyshack, Raging Bull, Friday The 13th, The Fog, The Blues Brothers.
Hmm, looks like 1980 was a much more 'classic' era than the 40s for hollywood, but you wouldn't have heard that from film buffs in the 80s.
Hollywood has always been a great abuser of the 'sling lots of shit at the wall and see what sticks' approach to 'greatness', they're just slinging a lot more shit these days.
Even if we take a really contemporary year and do the same study, we see a pattern of greats no matter what year, take 2005 at random:
Batman Begins, Sin City, V for Vendetta, Revenge of the Sith, King Kong, Brokeback Mountain, Harry Potter/Goblet of Fire, Serenity, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Mr & Mrs Smith, Wedding Crashers, Munich, Saw 2, Hostel, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Madagascar, Pride & Prejudice, Land of the Dead.
Ah, but the movie buff will point out that they're not established classics like Gone with the Wind, or Wizard of Oz. Not yet, anyway.
Edit: Btw, for 2005, the number of movies was 28,000+. Is it any wonder that there is a lot of formulaic stuff in there as well?
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.
Although the article mentions the topic, it has such a broad sweep that it obscures the real takeaway, which is the way that 3d is employed. All the stuff about the incredibly detailed CG, backstory etc. is valid and interesting, but epic levels of such are not really new - Star Wars has a very detailed alternative universe, and any Tolkien nerd above a certain age can remember the vast level of supplementary data on Middle Earth that existed before the movies (Tolkien was a philologist by profession so he had fully developed multiple languages etc. to invest his imaginary world with a sense of realism).
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...
EDIT: here are the articles I had wanted to include earlier. Variety interview with Cameron is light on technical detail but addresses other filmmaking concerns (like how it affects the editing process): http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117983864.html?categoryid=...
That's a great explanation, and now I'm very intrigued by this movie, but I only want to know one thing: can I comfortably wear the 3D glasses over my regular glasses? I don't have contacts, and I need glasses to see the screen properly.
Yes. I wear glasses too but the 'RealD' glasses handed out at most modern theaters remain comfortable for the whole film, I find. I gather there are some limitations, eg people with truly severe astigmatism, but mine is pretty bad and it hasn't been a problem.
Not to swamp the whole thread with my own links, but the projection technology is damn near as interesting as the acquisition technology. I got a far better grounding in the physics of both light and sound from working in this field than I ever did in school: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealD_Cinema
That very same deep focus technique in video games makes me nauseous on an hd tv. I wonder if it will be more or less puke-worthy in 3d. I'll report back on friday.
Great to read such an in depth analysis. I had read about Cameron's integration of CGI with live action at production time, but had not found anything that explains this different kind of 3D as well as you just did.
I've had this hunch for a while that there are show biz executives out there hoping against hope that Cameron's new 3D technology - which as you say can only be fully appreciated in the cinema - will magically save the industry from the evils of content piracy. Will be amusing to see how that pans out.
As much as I'm looking forward to seeing Avatar, a lot of the conversations that I've had with people about the movie revolve around the concern that the movie its self will be overshadowed by the technology. E.g. when Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was released, my friends and I went to see it solely because the CGI looked so state of the art (we're geeks, what can I say), and it surely had pretty graphics. But the story (what there was of it) and just about everything else sucked pretty hard. It seems like they were really counting on the CGI to carry the movie. Either that or they were just in denial of how crap the other aspects of the movie really were.
So I'm really just hoping that they've ended up putting more into Avatar than the new technology alone. A story line more original than that which has been hinted at would be good.
I'm fairly confident about this...partly as a fan of Cameron, but also because story/plot, although fundamentally important, need not be so complex or original to be good. As a quick tongue-in-cheek guide to previous work of his:
The Terminator: Robot from the future menaces woman from the present to protect own existence, future career as CA governor.
Aliens: return to th planet of the Aliens. Even with bigger guns, they are still dangerous.
The Abyss: Undersea explorers find intelligent life at bottom of sea, panic.
Terminator 2: Robot from the future menaces woman from the present to protect own existence, future governor of CA switches sides.
True Lies: Future CA governor is mild-mannered computer salesman by day, fights terrorists by night (should be familiar life situation to many HN readers).
Titanic: pretty heiress enjoys shipboard romance with handsome peasant until angry fiance catches her. Boat sinks, panic ensues.
Seriously, the fact that you can summarize a story easily tells us little about the process of working it out on screen for an audience. So while Avatar can be summed up as 'greedy humans want space oil buried under village of fighting smurfs, conflict ensues', the real story (as with most of his work) is what happens when an individual's experience of the world places them in conflict with the status quo, perhaps one that may not even exist yet. Critics may deride this as formulaic, but Cameron's main theme is the conflict between the individual and the social, which does not yield to simple analyses of good vs. evil.
Don't forget the implied Dances With Wolves style, "some humans see the error of their ways and go native." :P
But you're right, it doesn't need to be overly complex or totally original to be good. There's always room for a well told story, some of the best stories of modern times are retellings of archetypal themes.
Don't get me wrong, I am a fan of most of Cameron's work, the Terminator mythology (I even still have the old Terminator comics published by Dark Horse) and Aliens (also have the Dark Horse comics) probably more so than anything else. But at the very least, there better be some originality to the writing, even if still within the overall framework of his easily summarised story.
Maybe the potential for a simple synopsis is an indicator of a potentially excellent work, rather than the opposite. Who knew "Little fellow must dip a ring in lava to defeat an evil overlord" could last for three books?
BTW, if the discussion of the use of different camera angles and focus interests you, grab a copy of Citizen Kane with the commentaries by Roger Ebert and Peter Bogdanovich. There's tons of stuff going on in that film that, once pointed out, are simply amazing, and Ebert does a great job of explaining things.
I've been active on HN for more than a year but it still makes me smile when I see that someone has sat down and pounded out a comment like this that is so informative and well-crafted. An upvote for you, good sir (or ma'am).
I don't know, not to be nit-picky, but how am I supposed to believe a future human society can fly special forces to a far away planet and mind-control a genetically modified species, but still can't get a paralyzed dude to walk again on the cheap?
Maybe health care just sucks that bad in the future?
That's like asking why the people in Star Wars speak English :) Although this obvious plot query is nominally handled in the film, the real reason is that Cameron is using his epic canvas to present an exciting metaphor for how he sees the world, hence the object of desire (over which the conflicts take place) being dubbed 'unobtainium'.
Well, yes and no :) Characters aren't motivated in Star Wars to defeat the Empire so that they can be rewarded with the ability to speak English again, but one of the major motivating factors of this story is giving the protagonist the ability to walk again if accepts and succeeds in his task.
I don't really know anything about the plot, but it seems like I should be expecting a plot turn where the protagonist is faced with the dilemma of turning on his peers and his mission for love's sake, or doing something morally suspect so he can walk again. Just a guess, I really know nothing about the movie.
Funny, I noticed the game-like quality of the ads, but assumed that it meant they had finally reversed the relationship between games and movies. Like, they were releasing a very expensive game and the movie was just a giant ad.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadThis is just an advert for a movie.
http://www.red.com/ will make more of a difference. You can buy one for what it costs to rent others for a week or so.
Almost all 3d work made up to now has consisted of taking two good cameras and mounting them next to each other, then setting up the motors and lenses such that they operate perfectly in parallel. Cameron's key innovation is alter the viewing angle (interaxial distance) between the two lenses dynamically while preserving sufficiently good ergonomics to make it work on a set (rather than inside a lab). So this is a new approach to to the optical part of photography, rather than the recording substrate. Of course, this can and probably will be leveraged on behalf of Red camera users and others small enough to be mounted side-by-side on an adjustable platform.
Here's a good article about it: http://www.origin.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4...
We'll know soon enough.
If Cameron has made something that makes 3D integral to the cinema experience instead of just something that feels tacked-on and not necessary, that can definitely change cinema forever, whether we like it or not. :-)
BluRay has been out for a while. It's time for another format....
It paints him as a sort of Steve Jobs figure, with a really incredible drive to create and succeed, often at the expense of all else.
> She wanted to get married, but Cameron, she says, was not interested in a conventional domestic life: “He used to say to me, ‘Anybody can be a father or a husband. There are only five people in the world who can do what I do, and I’m going for that.’ ”
> [...]
> Before beginning production on “The Abyss” (1989), the most ambitious underwater movie ever attempted, he went to see Leonard Goldberg, then the president of Fox, which was financing the film. “He said, ‘I want you to know one thing—once we embark on this adventure and I start to make this movie, the only way you’ll be able to stop me is to kill me,’ ” Goldberg told me. “You looked into those eyes and you knew he meant it.”
“The words ‘No’ and ‘That’s impossible’ and phrases like ‘That can’t be done’—that’s the stuff that gives him an erection"
It also has some inconsistencies, the New Yorker said is was Space 2001 not Star Wars that inspired him to create films.
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?
We live in a world where people know nothing about cinema except what they see on commercials during the Simpsons. When you make a trailer, you're convincing the masses. You expect cinephiles to ignore trailers anyway.
It's the ultimate amateur mistake to assume a movie trailer is worth anything. It's marketing, and what's more, it's dumb marketing for dumb people.
Say what you will, but Titanic was the best thing that happened to my youth: every girl wanted to see it, over and over again, and no guy could stand it. Perfect.
Gollum in LOTR looked abhuman because well, he was supposed to.
Humanoid blue aliens are easier to "get right" than actual humans because nobody really knows how they are supposed to look and act.
However zombies don't look as horrifying in still pictures as they do in animation. Catching the bottom of the uncanny valley can have its benefit for directors as well.
In my experience the same reaction, though sometimes muted, applies to just about any living thing Hollywood attempts to computer generate. I can't remember having ever seen a convincing depiction of a dog, cat, or even insect for that matter.
It's entirely possible that an alien humanoid biological creature would appear to be obviously living to us in the same way as other non-human animals, and thus subject to the same "uncanny valley."
I haven't got the creepy feeling I have from other attempts, so I'd likely put them on the upward exponential out of the uncanny valley. I believe this may be greatly helped by the fact they're not supposed to look human.
It's like the aliens in the new Star Trek, the absolute weirdest was the comedic throwback of the green chick. The lack of prosthetics to modify her made her feel so much weirder than any of the others.
The fact that people are going to be going into the movie seeing spaceships and humans rendered in CGI before they see any of the aliens may help the aliens out of the uncanny valley. After wading through Disney Land and finding one of the humanoid robots they don't appear as false as the highly realistic androids being made in Japan despite not being of as good craftsmanship, why? Well I just walked through a mile of talking humanoid mice, anything remotely human is now believable!
However something to point out: Capgras syndrome gives the sufferer this 'uncanny valley' effect to anyone the person knows, they'll believe the person has been replaced by a duplicate.
Definitely excited to see the new film techniques though.
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.
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20...
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.
(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)
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.)
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.
Big dumb blockbusters have a quality of their own. Big budgets & mass appeal can easily seem to demand a bland inoffensiveness, but so don't watch them if you're in the mood for a smarter movie. There are still a few out there. And calling out for a time when films were Quality just strikes me as convenient nostalgia, ignoring past crap.
The undeniably great stories of western civilization total a hundred or so works over the course of our history. So the works of any given decade or generation will always be found wanting in that comparison. It shows nothing.
If anything, the old studio system was designed to shovel out disposable content even more so than the current configuration.
Now I don't have a comprehensive study to support my position, but until commonly accepted wisdom has one for its stance, I disagree.
If I were to rephrase my basic point, I would say that (in my view) technology, however good, is less important to good film-making than are other creative elements such as good story-telling. Thus, if film producers have limited resources to devote to a project and pour most of them into expensive technology as opposed to paying for quality scripts, story lines can and do suffer, as do the films associated with them. I think that has happened a lot in recent years but will grant that it is subjective on my part (there are, of course, a good number of original, quality scripts around in today's movies, with Pixar's output coming to mind among others).
Yes, well, I agree with that part. 110%. Possibly more.
1939: Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Gone With The Wind, The Wizard Of Oz, Stagecoach, Ninotchka, Wuthering Heights
1940: Rebecca, Fantasia, His Girl Friday, The Grapes of Wrath, The Philadelphia Story, The Great Dictator
1941: Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels
Rather than relying on personal taste, I took these from various 'top 100' lists. I haven't seen all of them myself, but the ones I have seen are a mile apart from anything released this year, or any recent year.
And I never argued that quality was constant. I believe it's essentially random. So the existence of an aberrant concentration of quality isn't surprising to me. I'm sure you could find clusters of a few years where nothing of note came out as well.
1980 for comparision, IMDB lists 6007 movies (8000+ if you include TV movies), and contains modern (popular) classics such as Stir Crazy, Superman II, Empire Strikes Back, Airplane!, The Blue Lagoon, Ordinary People, Urban Cowboy. The Shining, Caddyshack, Raging Bull, Friday The 13th, The Fog, The Blues Brothers.
Hmm, looks like 1980 was a much more 'classic' era than the 40s for hollywood, but you wouldn't have heard that from film buffs in the 80s.
Hollywood has always been a great abuser of the 'sling lots of shit at the wall and see what sticks' approach to 'greatness', they're just slinging a lot more shit these days.
Even if we take a really contemporary year and do the same study, we see a pattern of greats no matter what year, take 2005 at random:
Batman Begins, Sin City, V for Vendetta, Revenge of the Sith, King Kong, Brokeback Mountain, Harry Potter/Goblet of Fire, Serenity, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Mr & Mrs Smith, Wedding Crashers, Munich, Saw 2, Hostel, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Madagascar, Pride & Prejudice, Land of the Dead.
Ah, but the movie buff will point out that they're not established classics like Gone with the Wind, or Wizard of Oz. Not yet, anyway.
Edit: Btw, for 2005, the number of movies was 28,000+. Is it any wonder that there is a lot of formulaic stuff in there as well?
As for the 1980s, this was indeed a much better decade than the current one. The 70s were even better, much better than the 40s.
> is it really surprising that there were a handful of good movies among them?
Not good movies, great movies.
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.
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...
EDIT: here are the articles I had wanted to include earlier. Variety interview with Cameron is light on technical detail but addresses other filmmaking concerns (like how it affects the editing process): http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117983864.html?categoryid=...
And this white paper from Autodesk (who supply software tools for this, and who are a primary tech vendor for Avatar): http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/stereoscopic_whitepape...
This is a big concern for me.
Not to swamp the whole thread with my own links, but the projection technology is damn near as interesting as the acquisition technology. I got a far better grounding in the physics of both light and sound from working in this field than I ever did in school: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealD_Cinema
I've had this hunch for a while that there are show biz executives out there hoping against hope that Cameron's new 3D technology - which as you say can only be fully appreciated in the cinema - will magically save the industry from the evils of content piracy. Will be amusing to see how that pans out.
As much as I'm looking forward to seeing Avatar, a lot of the conversations that I've had with people about the movie revolve around the concern that the movie its self will be overshadowed by the technology. E.g. when Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was released, my friends and I went to see it solely because the CGI looked so state of the art (we're geeks, what can I say), and it surely had pretty graphics. But the story (what there was of it) and just about everything else sucked pretty hard. It seems like they were really counting on the CGI to carry the movie. Either that or they were just in denial of how crap the other aspects of the movie really were.
So I'm really just hoping that they've ended up putting more into Avatar than the new technology alone. A story line more original than that which has been hinted at would be good.
The Terminator: Robot from the future menaces woman from the present to protect own existence, future career as CA governor. Aliens: return to th planet of the Aliens. Even with bigger guns, they are still dangerous. The Abyss: Undersea explorers find intelligent life at bottom of sea, panic. Terminator 2: Robot from the future menaces woman from the present to protect own existence, future governor of CA switches sides. True Lies: Future CA governor is mild-mannered computer salesman by day, fights terrorists by night (should be familiar life situation to many HN readers). Titanic: pretty heiress enjoys shipboard romance with handsome peasant until angry fiance catches her. Boat sinks, panic ensues.
Seriously, the fact that you can summarize a story easily tells us little about the process of working it out on screen for an audience. So while Avatar can be summed up as 'greedy humans want space oil buried under village of fighting smurfs, conflict ensues', the real story (as with most of his work) is what happens when an individual's experience of the world places them in conflict with the status quo, perhaps one that may not even exist yet. Critics may deride this as formulaic, but Cameron's main theme is the conflict between the individual and the social, which does not yield to simple analyses of good vs. evil.
But you're right, it doesn't need to be overly complex or totally original to be good. There's always room for a well told story, some of the best stories of modern times are retellings of archetypal themes.
Don't get me wrong, I am a fan of most of Cameron's work, the Terminator mythology (I even still have the old Terminator comics published by Dark Horse) and Aliens (also have the Dark Horse comics) probably more so than anything else. But at the very least, there better be some originality to the writing, even if still within the overall framework of his easily summarised story.
http://www.amazon.com/Citizen-Two-Disc-Special-Orson-Welles/...
Maybe health care just sucks that bad in the future?
I don't really know anything about the plot, but it seems like I should be expecting a plot turn where the protagonist is faced with the dilemma of turning on his peers and his mission for love's sake, or doing something morally suspect so he can walk again. Just a guess, I really know nothing about the movie.