How AVATAR is Reshaping 3D

Whether you’re a rabid fan who can’t wait to smear yourself in blue body paint for the next comicon, or a cinephile who can’t get over the fact that “Avatar’s” storyline indulges in archetypes that were old hat way before “Dances With Wolves” or “Pocahontas,” pretty much everyone can agree that James Cameron’s “Avatar” is a groundbreaking visual experience. Combine that with its snowballing box office take (it was number 1 for the sixth week in a row this weekend), and there’s no doubt “Avatar” is set to exert a massive influence on the future of 3-D films. Still, with so many strong opinions about the plot being lobbed around, there’s been very little discussion of exactly what, in terms of technique, really sets “Avatar” apart form its high-concept 3-D predecessors.
At the most basic level, “Avatar’s” real innovation is its sensibility. This is the first film that fully engages the new generation 3-D technology on a holistic, multifaceted level. With “Avatar,” James Cameron is attempting to deploy and reconcile the sensory illusion of digital 3-D with the century old foundations of two dimensional film language. “Avatar” is the first film where every shot, every 3-D effect seems calculated with something more than visual punctuation or cheap gimmickry in mind, the first 3-D film that seems to have an overarching aesthetic plan. In short, James Cameron and his cinematographers were thinking in 3 dimensions every time they looked through a camera lens, and that mindfulness comes through in almost every shot of the film.
The first image fires a quiet but portentous opening shot in “Avatar’s” 3-D revolution. It also instantly establishes Cameron’s determination to reconciliate traditional film techniques with 3-D cinematography. “Avatar” opens with an extreme close-up of protagonist Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) awakening from hibernation in a cryo-pod. In the shot’s foreground, floating above the plane of the screen, several hazy smudges drift back and forth in the frame. So early in the film, the unacclimated viewer’s first thought is that, perhaps, these wisps are some unintentional digital artifact, a glitch. Then, suddenly, the camera’s focus changes, snapping the floating smudges into 3-Dimensional clarity and blurring out Worthington’s face. The smudges are revealed as globules of liquid floating in zero-gravity and floating above the plane of the screen in 3-D. What seems like a defect turns out to be an element in the frame. The shot uses a tried and true cinematographic effect, the rack focus, a shallow-focus shot that draws the viewers attentions form one object to another by changing which is in focus during the shot. When the technique is used in conjunction with 3-D, there is an added affect, the effect of disorientation giving way to revelation. Initially the indefinable smudges create a separation from the world on screen, but that distracting separation suddenly settles into empathy when the objects are pulled in to focus, connecting what the viewer sees with what Sully sees. Thus, at the earliest moment in “Avatar” we see 3-D photography deployed for empathy and acclimation rather than spectacle and an old trick is redefined by taking a new technology and manipulating it through basics cinematography.
Cameron has little desire to break the foreground plane of the screen just to send objects flying out into the audience. This alone sets him miles ahead of most of his 3-D predecessors. There are precious few indulgent shots of jungle monsters leaping into the theater in “Avatar”, no spaceships zooming straight into the camera and off the screen. Unlike most of his 3-D predecessors, Cameron seems to know that the cheap gimmick of reaching into the audience with extreme 3-D effects actually shatters the film experience by calling attention to the separation between the world on the screen and the world of the audience.  Rather than throw the film out of the screen and into the audience, Cameron constantly uses the multiple planes of 3-D depth to pull the viewers into the screen.

Revenue Avatar

Film Revenue Avatar (2009) Income Exceeds Titanic (1997)

CBS News reported that the income figures Avatar (2009) have exceeded the income figures record the movie Titanic (1997). Avatar and Titanic are both directed, produced and written by the same filmmaker James Cameron.

Avatar the movie was released in two formats namely 2D and 3D, making this film he said the production cost of $ 237 million and marketing costs of $ 150 million