Geekery

Avatar the Game: Dev Diary

Posted on 21. Jan, 2010 by Jake.

Check out James Cameron, Jon Landau and a team of developers explain how, for Avatar, both the game and the film, they created an entire universe…

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Geek God – James Cameron

Posted on 19. Aug, 2009 by Jake.

When one mentions James Cameron one could almost be referring to two people simultaneously. There’s the Oscar-baiting period-obsessed “King of the World” Cameron; then there’s the man who endeared himself to legions of geeks by directing some of the greatest sci-fi films of all time, inventing all sorts of groundbreaking movie tech as he went along and essentially ushering in the era of CGI filmmaking. Obviously, we’ll be focusing on the latter.
Cameron cut his teeth as a screenwriter, effects designer and model maker for the legendary Roger Corman. Appropriately, Cameron’s later advances in CGI would prove to be just as influential as Corman’s preceding work with stop-motion animation, with Cameron essentially ushering in the transition from stop-motion characters to computer-generated ones.

Cameron’s first major success as a director came with The Terminator, a movie that exceeded all expectations and proved that sci-fi could be a profitable genre and appeal to wider audience, rather than a small niche. After the success of The Terminator, Cameron went on to direct two more hugely popular sci-fi films, Aliens in 1986 and The Abyss in 1989. Significantly, both Aliens and The Abyss picked up Oscars for Best Visual Effects, foreshadowing the revolution that Cameron was about to usher in with his next major film.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day is a strong contender for the most influential film of the last 20 years. At the time it was released, it was also the most expensive film ever made, although it made more the double its budget at the box office and proved to be a massive hit for Cameron. T2 contained an unprecedented number of CGI shots, almost 300 in total, but it was the manner in which they were integrated into the action that changed the way movies were made.
Applying technology developed on one of his previous films, The Abyss, Cameron came up with the concept of a cyborg made entirely out of liquid metal. Shots of the T1000 morphing from one form to another cost almost six million dollars and took eight months to produce, but the payoff was cinema’s first realistically rendered CGI character and proof the CGI could be integrated into movie in a seamless manner and used to produce shots that no-one would have dreamed possible.
 Like Aliens and The Abyss before it, Terminator 2 went on to win several Oscars, including Best Visual Effects. Besides being critically acclaimed and massively successful, there’s a strong argument to be made for T2 being the most influential film of the last 20 years. Put simply, it proved that CGI was a viable technology; without T2 there would be no Matrix, no Spiderman, no Lord of the Rings.
 
Cameron is currently working on his first feature since Titanic swept the Oscars in 1997. It’s called Avatar and it’s set to do for 3D technology what T2 did for CGI. Footage has already been screened and one of the people who saw it had this to say: “I think it’s gonna be gigantic. It’s gonna be another one of those benchmarks. There’s gonna be Before that movie and After.” This person just happens to be Setevn Soderbergh, who’s directed everything from grimy indie films to multiple Oscar-winners like Traffic and Erin Brokovich to blockbusters like Ocean’s 11, so he probably knows what he’s talking about.

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