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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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=...
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.