James Cameron will take moviegoers back to Pandora in a pair of Avatar sequels that he promises will deliver the same visual and emotional impact as the original sci-fi smash.
“In the second and third films, which will be self-contained stories that also fulfill a greater story arc, we will not back off the throttle of Avatar’s visual and emotional horsepower, and will continue to explore its themes and characters, which touched the hearts of audiences in all cultures around the world,” Cameron told Daily Variety. “I’m looking forward to returning to Pandora, a world where our imaginations can run wild.”
The deal between Cameron and 20th Century Fox was announced Wednesday. Cameron will direct the sequels, which will be his next two movie projects. Planned release dates for the tentatively titled Avatar 2and Avatar 3 are December 2014 and December 2015.
Fox Filmed Entertainment chairmen Jim Gianopulos and Tom Rothman called the Avatar sequels the studio’s highest priority.
“Avatar is not only the highest-grossing movie of all time; it created a universe based on the singular imagination and daring of James Cameron, who also has raised the consciousness of people worldwide to some of the greatest issues facing our planet,” Gianopulos and Rothman told Daily Variety. “We had no greater priority, and can feel no greater joy, than enabling Jim to continue and expand his vision of the world of Avatar.”
The besieged world of Pandora, filled with exotic flora and fauna inspired at least in part by Cameron’s underwater adventures, proved a powerful draw right from its unveiling at last year’s Comic-Con International in San Diego. Cameron showed 20 minutes of Avatar to an enthusiastic crowd, and it was clear from that footage alone that he had dreamed up — and delivered on-screen — a deeply cohesive world for a cinematic franchise that could become his Star Wars.
The 2009 movie, a classic hero’s journey about a paralyzed vet who inhabits a synthetic blue body and fights alongside natives on Pandora, has grossed nearly $2.8 billion so far, making it the all-time international box office champ. Perhaps more importantly, the movie’s incredibly immersive 3-D visuals set a new standard for cinematic excellence.
Avatar’s unbridled success fueled the current push to film in 3-D and convert classic movies like Star Wars for 3-D rerelease.
The technological secrets of James Cameron's new film Avatar
So far, most successful 3D movies have been entirely animated – and Cameron, too, has used computer generated images to build his virtual world. Avatar's footage is built from around 70% CGI, including the female lead, a blue alien played by Star Trek's Zoe Saldana. As a result, the cast donned motion-capture suits – essentially, leotards covered in sensors that feed the movements of the body back to a bank of computers – and acted out their scenes on a "performance capture" stage six times bigger than anything used in Hollywood before.
Cameron also attempted to crank up the realism by improving the way the suits captured the actors' facial expressions, using a skull cap with a camera enhancement that closely monitored their eyes, mouth and other small movements.
Motion capture makes 3D much easier, not just because it allows film-makers to add the special effects later, but also by letting them position the "camera" (actually a viewpoint from inside the virtual world), wherever they want. If the director wants to shift the angle to the left or right, it's done with a click of the mouse and the computer then works out what it would look like. In most ways, the technique is more closely aligned with the way that high-end computer games are developed rather than traditional Hollywood productions.
Here’s what he says in the above clip.
One major advance with Avatar's setup was the creation of a virtual monitor that allowed the director to see the motion capture results in real-time, as they were filmed, instead of waiting for the computer to render the images.
Cameron spent much of his own time and a significant amount of money upgrading the systems used for Avatar, but he hasn't just used 3D for the computer-generated portions of the film: new techniques were also created for the live action parts.
Working with long-time collaborator Vincent Pace – founder of a camera equipment outfit in Los Angeles – Cameron developed a filming rig that is more advanced than anything that has gone before. The setup 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.
Filming is just one element of creating a 3D movie, however. The other part – which most people are more familiar with – is viewing it in the cinema. Here Avatar is less revolutionary. Although most of tomorrow's trailers will be shown on the giant, high resolution Imax screens, the audience will be using the same technologies used for recent 3D films such as Bolt, Coraline and Polar Express. Viewing not only requires a digitally equipped cinema (sometimes with a silver-coated screen to boost the brightness), but also that stalwart of three dimensional cinema: a pair of special glasses.
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.
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