Stupid question, is this based on the Nickelodeon cartoon of the same name?

That's The Last Airbender by M. Night Shyamalan.

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=e0ZjjMBXMpk

Edited December 7, 200916 yr by Sylph

But if it doesn't do so hot in the box office, will studios be less reluctant to use this 3D Technology for their films?

Take a look at this. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time cost $200m and Avatar between $230m and $500m (the $500m is a much-debated story from The New York Times). Boucher called all the rumours false.

Does he even know what the rumors are? That sounds like saving face to me.

He didn't even bother addressing which figures were right because he doesn't even know. There were even reports out saying that James Cameron was still doing expensive audio post production into mid-November, before Thanksgiving.

It's okay to say you spent money on a film(no matter how gasp-worthy the dollar amount was), but it seems like they are majorly downplaying the numbers in the event that it becomes a financial flop.

BTW, that song... It's as if Jim plagiarised himself again. It resembles in some parts to My Heart Will Go On.

Does he even know what the rumors are? That sounds like saving face to me.

He didn't even bother addressing which figures were right because he doesn't even know. There were even reports out saying that James Cameron was still doing expensive audio post production into mid-November, before Thanksgiving.

It's okay to say you spent money on a film(no matter how gasp-worthy the dollar amount was), but it seems like they are majorly downplaying the numbers in the event that it becomes a financial flop.

Agreement.

BTW, that song... It's as if Jim plagiarised himself again. It resembles in some parts to My Heart Will Go On.

But the difference between My Heart Will Go On vs. I See You is that MHWGO earned their big, screeching finale by starting off slow and THEN going for the big, well deserved sharp cheddar ending. ISY is so oversung and so overproduced that when they go for the drums and horns, it's doesn't set itself apart from the rest of the song.

I agree it's a ripoff, but the least they could have done was build up to Leona screaming.

But hey, I'll admit. I like the song.

Edited December 7, 200916 yr by bellcurve

But the difference between My Heart Will Go On vs. I See You is that MHWGO earned their big, screeching finale by starting off slow and THEN going for the big, well deserved sharp cheddar ending. ISY is so oversung and so overproduced that when they go for the drums and horns, it's doesn't set itself apart from the rest of the song.

I agree it's a ripoff, but the least they could have done was build up to Leona screaming.

But hey, I'll admit. I like the song.

I am in equal part in love with it and detest it. Leona Lewis overdoes it, and overdoes it — badly! Just horrible.

The reason why I love it is the arrangement, the twinkly percussion, the processed vocals in the beginning, the orchestral backing… But some melodic lines make no sense! It's as if they did it only to avoid being called out on using simplistic, overdone melodic movements and trite harmonies.

Didn't really like ISY on the first listen. MHWGO is way better - it's more emotional and the music/melody/production is better.

<p><span style="font-size:19.5pt;"><font face="Verdana">Avatar: pictures of James Cameron’s fantastic new world</font></span>

<span style="font-size:10.5pt;"><b><font face="Georgia">James Cameron’s new 3-D blockbuster Avatar has a host of stunning effects. The director gives some of his favourites</font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:7.5pt;"><b><font face="Georgia">Kevin Maher</font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:10.5pt;"><font face="Georgia">James Cameron, the 55-year-old blockbuster director, describes his latest movie, Avatar, as “very personal for me”. The self-proclaimed “king of the world, and maker of popcorn classics such as The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss and Titanic, says the 3-D science-fiction parable Avatar has been with him for ever. “It was the dream project that I’ve always wanted to do,” he says, referring to the outlandish tale of 9ft blue-skinned Na’vi warriors on the fantastical planet of Pandora. “It was the chance to put together all these vistas and cool creatures that have been knocking around inside my brain since I was a kid.” The dream, naturally, doesn’t come cheap. So far, the cost is counted in 15 years of fitful development and a production budget that, at modest estimates, has surpassed $350 million (£214 million), including a new 3-D camera system called 3-D Fusion, which gives a crisper, more realisitic image. Most of the budget has gone on labour, and Cameron is keen to emphasise the vastness of the undertaking — up to 800 artists working full time for four and a half years on the movie’s record-breaking 2,500 effects shots.

The high cost will be reflected in prestige ticket prices: most UK cinemas place a £1.90 surcharge on screenings of 3-D movies, while some, such as the Cineworld theatre chain, also make an additional 80p charge for audience members who wish to purchase and keep their 3-D glasses.

Cameron, however, is confident that the price is right for Avatar. “It’s a great 2-D film first of all,” he says. “But if you choose to pay the extra money and seek it out in 3-D, you’ll have a much more enriched experience.”

Typically, the Avatar plotline is audacious, and follows a paraplegic marine called Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who lands on the hostile planet of Pandora, then “remotely inhabits” the cloned body of a Na’vi, falls in love with a local female called Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and eventually organises an armed rebellion against his military paymasters.

The ambitious process of bringing this story to the screen has been rewarding, transformative (“I don’t yell at everyone any more”) and exhausting, Cameron says. But would he do it again? “I don’t think so,” he says, laughing. “If the film is a huge hit we’ll convince ourselves that it was all worth it, and start thinking about a sequel. But right now, honestly, I really couldn’t tell you.”

The Thanator

I don’t want to steal the thunder of the dozen world-class concept artists who worked on the movie, but this one is mine. It’s of a Thanator, who is the king predator of the ground in Pandora. I had this murky picture of him in my mind when I wrote the script — a big, black, shiny, armoured six-legged panther. Of course, you can’t depict that literally, so you think: “How can I make that alien?” And you come up with these flexible bone shields around it and sensor quills.

Where it says on the drawing “operculum” at the bottom, that’s essentially a nostril, which is based on the way a stingray has a flapper valve on the top of its head. There are lots of bits of nature in here, stuff that I’ve seen. The single-plated tooth is based on a dinichthys, an armoured fish from the Triassic period. You have to be kind of crazy to have fun with this stuff, but it is fun. It’s me as a kid in school, drawing alien creatures during class. That’s exactly where it comes from.

Neytiri

This is a photograph of a bust, cast from the actress Zoe Saldana, who plays Neytiri. Around the mouth, the jaw, and even up into the cheekbones, this character is essentially Zoe. The only place she’s changed is around the nose and the wide spacing of the eyes. It took several hundred million man-hours to achieve, but in the end 100 per cent of Zoe’s performance is mapped on to her CG character. Normally, the gap between a real human performance and a replicated CG performance is called “the uncanny valley”. Well, I told everyone when we started this project: “If we’re still in the uncanny valley when we are done, then we’re dead!”

And so we spent a lot of money, a lot of time and a lot of human energy to get to the other side of the uncanny valley. And I promise you, we’ve absolutely done it. Of course, there are some shots that are an 8 out of 10. While others are a 10. However, there’s a whole bunch in there where the knob goes right up to 11.

The Tree of Souls

This is a very important spot in the film. It’s called the Tree of Souls, and it’s a big input-output station, if you like, where the Na’vi are able to communicate with the big global biological network of their world. It was inspired by some of the bioluminescence I’ve seen underwater.

I’ve been a diver since I was 16, but you don’t have to go deep down to the abyssal depths to see these things. Even on a night-time dive, at 25ft you can see a phantasmagoria of forms and colours that you couldn’t dream of during the daytime.

When you’re down two or three thousand feet, just drifting downwards through the water column, if you turn off the lights on the submersible and look out, you’ll see things swimming by that can’t even be classified, creatures flashing with all different hues, purples and reds, quite amazing. So one of the things I did when working with the concept artists was to try and capture this wonder at the sense of nature that really is around us.

Jake and Neytiri look upon Pandora

Here we’re standing on a bough at somewhere around the 250m mark, up inside a Great Tree. We came up with this idea that there were two scales of trees — the normal jungle canopy, which was up to 100m, and then this other species of trees, called the Great Trees, which are the ones you see dotting this landscape. They have a deep significance in the story and are where Neytiri’s clan have lived for 10,000 years. There is an environmental theme here, and I think the through-line from this to my other films is Man’s relationship to the environment and to technology.

Avatar is not only about how our technological civilisation has depleted and destroyed our world, how we take what we need without giving back, without a sense of stewardship. But it’s also about how this attitude is going to be applied to the next planet we visit, which here is Pandora. But, unlike Earth, Pandora pushes back. Strongly. In this context the Na’vi are aspirational characters; they represent the freedom of spirit that we don’t have any more.

Samson gunship attack

A Samson gunship is being attacked by a Banshee. This is from the movie’s climax, which has so many layers of performance, or animation, and of live action all thrown into the blender that it’s practically a mini-movie in itself. It takes place in the floating mountains, where intense magnetic fields throw the ship’s instrumentation, forcing them back into a Second World War-style combat mode. Which is simply a way of creating a situation where you’ve got pterodactyls fighting helicopters and who wouldn’t want to see that?

And yes, I have small intimate scenes within the film, and within all my big films. But I couldn’t do a whole movie on a small scale. There are a lot of film-makers who could do that better than I could, but couldn’t necessarily do what I do. I’ve got to have something that’s going to capture my imagination, and challenge me, and push me. The goal here is not to change the medium as we know it. That may, sometimes, have been the effect, but it’s not the cause. For me, the cause is always, “What would be really cool to do?”

The Hallelujah Mountains

These floating mountains are a surreal Magritte-type image that the eye accepts quite willingly. The rocks look real, the clouds look real, and all the subsets of the image look real, even though it’s a nonsense image. We found that a shot like this, a wide vista without anything in the foreground, doesn’t need to be in 3-D. Which was fine with us, because the 3-D in Avatar is conservative, in the sense that it’s not constantly jabbing you in the eye, taking you out of the story. Instead we made sure that the 3-D supported the story and immersed you in it. We worked for years to eliminate what we call “brain sheer”, which is a bad 3-D effect that causes your eyeballs to try to fix it, which causes eye strain and ultimately headaches. We’ve eliminated it totally in Avatar. And yet I think the movie has already had the greatest impact it will have — in anticipation of a commercial hit the exhibition sector has put in an extra 3,000 3-D-compatible screens in the past six months, globally.

Avatar is on general release from Dec 17</font></span>

<span style="font-size:7.5pt;"><b><font face="Georgia">http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article6947527.ece</font></b></span></p>

You will also find small photos following the link.

I still don't know what to think of this movie....

I want to watch it, out of curiosity mainly, but I have this feeling that I will be horribly disappointed....

I still don't know what to think of this movie....

I want to watch it, out of curiosity mainly, but I have this feeling that I will be horribly disappointed....

If you expect a nice little story, forget it. This will be something like that guy Emmerich does, only whereas Emmerich's is D-list sh!t, this is A-list. The only thing worth seeing will be those much-talked-about effects and how that never-before-seen 3D works.

If you expect a nice little story, forget it. This will be something like that guy Emmerich does, only whereas Emmerich's is D-list sh!t, this is A-list. The only thing worth seeing will be those much-talked-about effects and how that never-before-seen 3D works.

Yeah, that's the feeling I get from it... I guess I'll just go and enjoy it for what it is.

Kinda like 2012. I don't expect that movie has any other reason of existence other than its special effects.

If you expect a nice little story, forget it. This will be something like that guy Emmerich does, only whereas Emmerich's is D-list sh!t, this is A-list. The only thing worth seeing will be those much-talked-about effects and how that never-before-seen 3D works.

Except Emmerich doesn't get awards. There's already buzz that Avatar could get some Golden Globes nominations and now there's 10 spots for Best Picture at the Oscar, Avatar could slip in.

Except Emmerich doesn't get awards. There's already buzz that Avatar could get some Golden Globes nominations and now there's 10 spots for Best Picture at the Oscar, Avatar could slip in.

Which is why I said this is A-list crap.

Which is why I said this is A-list crap.

If you think it's crap then why are you all a buzz over Avatar? Why do you care so much....Starting the thread, posting articles, etc?

If you think it's crap then why are you all a buzz over Avatar? Why do you care so much....Starting the thread, posting articles, etc?

I'm interested. To see how it does, what's the music like, how bad the screenplay is, what can these new 3D cameras do, how will it end, what will possible sequels be like...