PIXEL MAVERICK

I am stuck in Seattle thanks to 18 inches of snow dumped in VA last night — so along with two other stranded Martinites we killed some time today by going to see the highly anticipated movie Avatar.

All I can say is WOW.

I have a 5 year old so I see pretty much every animated movie that comes out, but Avatar blows all of them away by a mile.  The level of detail that is captured is amazing …the facial expressions, the eyes, the way the skin wrinkles or compresses/releases when touched, the flutter of a leaf from one of the plants in the Pandora jungles …I knew I was watching animation but seriously it was very hard to tell it apart from reality.

I had an opportunity to read a great article in Wired on one of my many flights this week about how Cameron created his own video/camera technology to be able to shoot this film.  He could look through the camera at the actors wearing the tights and the funny balls all over (like they do for gaming, etc) and not only does he see the actor’s avatar in the lens …he sees the virtual world of Pandora around him/her.  So, instead of simply capturing all the various movements of the character and then letting the programmer animation geeks do all the rest he was able to have the actors perform many of the scenes just like they would if they were shooting a regular film.  This must be one of the core reasons why it all looked so real, because it basically was a real human performing the actions under the watchful direction of Cameron.

“He started by hiring USC linguistic expert Paul Frommer to invent an entirely new language for the Na’vi, the blue-skinned natives of Pandora.”

“With the language established, Cameron set about naming everything on his alien planet. Every animal and plant received Na’vi, Latin, and common names. As if that weren’t enough, Cameron hired Jodie Holt, chair of UC Riverside’s botany and plant sciences department, to write detailed scientific descriptions of dozens of plants he had created. She spent five weeks explaining how the flora of Pandora could glow with bioluminescence and have magnetic properties. When she was done, Cameron helped arrange the entries into a formal taxonomy.”

They could have just stopped at incredible animation and it would have still been great.  But Cameron took this passion to the next level.  He hired linguists to develop the entire langage of Pandora — he hired botonists to create and formally document each and every plant on the ficticious planet.  This entire world is captured in a book that will allow people who loved the movie to explore all the details of Pandora as if they were exploring a real new planet/place.

This movie is a product of passion and it shows in the details.  This movie should win every award possible this year & I hope that Cameron takes this passion a step further and creates Pandora online.  He should create the entire world of Pandora as an online world and make it available to everyone for free.  He could be like Lucas and monetize every last pixel, but I think he could outdo Lucas by making it open to everyone and just making more movies (and a few action figures of course).

Simply amazing.