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James Cameron’s New 3-D Epic Could Change Film Forever
- axod 17y agoI don't see why this "Could change film forever". This is just an advert for a movie.
- sree_nair 17y agoHave to say the first page of the article was quite inspirational.
- josefresco 17y agoWhile 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.
- anamax 17y ago> a new camera that has already changed film making http://www.red.com/ 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.
- anigbrowl 17y agoNo. 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. Here's a good article about it: http://www.origin.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4310810.html http://www.origin.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4...
- anamax 17y agoYou're assuming that 3D will be significant. I don't. We'll know soon enough.
- henrikschroder 17y agoIt'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. :-)
- anamax 17y ago3D may revolutionize cinema, but if it does, I'll bet that it comes to the home as well. BluRay has been out for a while. It's time for another format....
- mbrubeck 17y agoThis (long) New Yorker profile of Cameron might be more interesting to some Hacker News readers. It focuses less on the tech, and more on Cameron's personality and career: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/26/091026fa_fact_goodyear http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/26/091026fa_fact_... 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.”
- quickpost 17y agoI second this article - it really made me like James Cameron... dude is hard core.
- redcap 17y agogood article, worth reading just for this quote by bill paxton: “The words ‘No’ and ‘That’s impossible’ and phrases like ‘That can’t be done’—that’s the stuff that gives him an erection"
- dmix 17y agoThis article is much better than Wired's. It also has some inconsistencies, the New Yorker said is was Space 2001 not Star Wars that inspired him to create films.
- peterwwillis 17y agoLooks 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?
- unalone 17y agoWe 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.
- Freebytes 17y agoThe 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.
- mumrah 17y agoMaybe it's just me, but these blue dudes are not quite out of the uncanny valley.
- Tyheam 17y agoThey 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.
- bitwize 17y agoTheir mouth movements are more natural and human than the creepy marionettes in Robert Zemeckis's "performance capture" movies.
- StrawberryFrog 17y agoA marker of how far we are through the uncanny valley is how close to human the creatures are that we are asked to believe in. 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.
- Retric 17y agoI have seen plenty of CGI pictures on the other side of the uncanny valley. The problem seems to be motion and lighting.
- StrawberryFrog 17y agoYep. still pictures are a lot further than moving ones.
- duhprey 17y agoI don't think it's that stills are "further" as much as that the error doesn't accumulate.
- trevelyan 17y agoHe 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.
- CrLf 17y agoOut-Lucas Lucas is easy, just throw a decent story in there, and don't get high on the effects. Given Hollywoods history in recent years, I'm not to confident that Avatar will be such a good movie.
- chadgeidel 17y agoI thought so too, but Roger Ebert gave it 4 stars: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091211/REVIEWS/912119998 http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20...
- byrneseyeview 17y agoAs 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.
- pchristensen 17y agoIt'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.
- sketerpot 17y agoI think the idea was to show that he's in it for the art, not for the money.
- byrneseyeview 17y agoIf I were in it for the money (i.e. if I were a major studio), that would not be a good sign.
- boredguy8 17y agoThe 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 http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/5/8/73755/86297 provided the link, though I'm not finding the document online any longer. (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 http://www.horrorlair.com/moviescripts_a_f.html has more)
- NathanKP 17y agoLink to the full page version: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/11/ff_avatar_cameron/all/1 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.)
- grellas 17y agoThe 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.
- vaporstun 17y agoDamn, nobody liked it when I submitted the exact same link with the exact same title 2 days ago. :( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=991197 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.
- anigbrowl 17y agoAlthough 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 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.
- mtalantikite 17y agoI 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?
- anigbrowl 17y agoThat'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'.
- mtalantikite 17y agoWell, 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.
- neilk 17y agoFunny, 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.