Cameron's Avatar a 3D Drug Trip? 215
bowman9991 writes "James Cameron's first movie since Titanic, his upcoming science fiction epic Avatar, has a budget pushing US$200 million and enough hype to power a mission to Mars. Now it appears the 3D technology he created to turn his vision into a reality, the key to Avatar's success or failure, may be habit forming. Dr. Mario Mendez, a behavioral neurologist at the University of California, said it is entirely possible Cameron's 3D technology could tap brain systems that are undisturbed by conventional 2D movies. Cameron himself believes 3D viewing 'is so close to a real experience that it actually triggers memory creation in a way that 2D viewing doesn't' and that stereoscopic (3D) viewing uses more neurons, which would further heighten its impact."
Uncanny nightmares (Score:2, Interesting)
So far the only thing I've heard Cameron talk about this movie is about how this movie is going to be ultra realistic 3D rendering. At which point it begs the question why not just use live actors from the get go? The biggest obstacle you have when doing hyper realistic 3D productions is the uncanny valley and getting characters that wind up looking like wax statues. Plus these live action directors have zero head for directing animation. Think Polar Express and Monster House. It's all mocap since they can't deal with regular animation pipelines. And mocap presents even more problems with believability, since if everything's not bang on 100% real, the jerky movement you get with mocap ruins the experience. There are reasons animation principles were developed.
If this movie winds up giving people fake memories it could very well result in horrible nightmares...
horseshit hype (Score:4, Interesting)
ORLY?
And what if I went to a theater, with THREE DIMENSIONAL HUMAN BEINGS walking around on a THREE DIMENSIONAL STAGE! How would my "inner global-positioning system" react to that!
Just the usual bollocks that "news" magazines print when a big movie comes out. Remember the stories about "possible giant apes" when King Kong was released?
And Slashdot goes along with it, uncritically regurgitating the crappy pseudo news written to promote the next Big Summer Movie.
The movie itself may well be fun. But news and science shouldn't whore themselves out to Hollywood.
Visual medium = psychological effects (Score:5, Interesting)
For all the "bah humbug" blathering on this thread, methinks there's something to it.
Surely most of us geeks have noticed the difference in mental state & perception caused by 24FPS, 30FPS, 60FPS, 3:2 pulldown, and other differences in visual medium. Each causes a different psychological state, with some causing more of a stupor and others more a sense of real. 3D, done right, will lead to other mental effects. I don't think a major director experimenting with new technology would be BSing us about what it does to the viewer's mind.
Personally, I've seen one 3D IMAX film (something about Egypt) which unlike other "hey wow it's 3D!" movies really did give a deep sense of "being there". Move that effect to a full-blown bleeding-edge movie by a director known for pushing visual limits, and we may very well experience something new.
Reminds of this STNG episode The Game (Score:1, Interesting)
Yes, I know it is not an exact analogy, but it struck me the same way as when I watched this episode.
http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/series/TNG/episode/68518.html
Idiotic. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I'm blind in one eye... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not blind, but because I was cross-eyed for many years before I had corrective surgery, my brain tends to focus out of one eye primarily. My stereoscopic vision is quite limited, thus reducing depth perception and making it nearly impossible to see using those 3D glasses.
I remember staring at those Magic Eye posters for hours, frustrated that all the other kids could see dolphins and ships and stuff, while all I saw was a bunch of weird looking colors.
Thanks to the wonders of a college class on Visual Perception, I now understand why. Mod this "+5, Woe is me"?
Re:Uncanny nightmares (Score:3, Interesting)
So far the only thing I've heard Cameron talk about this movie is about how this movie is going to be ultra realistic 3D rendering. At which point it begs the question why not just use live actors from the get go?
I hate to say it, but some of the ultra realistic 3d renderings I have seen recently have been more realistic than live actors... sort of.
Why? because it's difficult to make the impossible look like it really happened with just filming techniques. So you end up with a good live action dialog followed by a CG or special effect scene that tries but just doesn't quite look real.
If you don't try to recreate something "real" and instead go for a consistent almost-real look, you don't have those periods of distraction where the director switches to special effects or CG. Overall the movie feels more realistic because your not reminded that it isn't real.
Of course, there are always those people who can't get past the slight differences between CG and real.
Oh, and until you see the movie, don't judge. The "ultra realistic 3d" might just be that good. I know I have seen some amazing renderings lately.
Crazy story.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, the first thing I have to say is you all are not going to believe this story is true. But I swear, this story is 100% true. It is not an exaggeration in any way. It is true.
At the time, I had been a professor at this college for ten years and was on sabbatical. During this time, I decided to take a film class at the American Film Institute. You see, I used to spend a lot of time with filmmakers and artists, and the like, and I hadn't done that for a while, so I decided to take this film class now that I could devote the time to it.
It was a fantastic class. A lot of big name screenwriters came by. The writer of "Basic Instinct", the writer of "Deadpool", to name some. For the class we all wrote a trunk script, which is a script you carry around to show to studios and producers to try and sell. I wrote a script titled "Panama City," which is not relevant to the story. During the course of the class, I got to have coffee with film students and big name screenwriters, and such. Discussion of a screenplay called "Avatar" came up among screenwriters.
One day, the writer of "Deadpool" and another screenwriter friend of his came in and talked to us and I asked the screenwriter friend about this screenplay, "Avatar", and a hush came over the room. He went on to explain the premise of the screenplay which is this:
In this screenplay, there are pantheons of gods fighting a cosmic war, but because they have no understanding of war, there are fallen angels sent to Earth to recruit human military specialists and tacticians, and the like. A lot of this stuff is based on Plato's Temius, and the fallen angels have sunglasses to hide the light in their eyes.
It was never really explained how the recruitment worked. After this guy was done explaining the plot, the writer of "Deadpool" speaks up and says, "there's something else you should say... Avatar is an actual battleplan." This man said that "Avatar" was a master plan for gods disguised as a screenplay.
After that things just got really bizarre! There were all these discussions about "Avatar". "Who has Avatar?" You'd ask people about "Avatar" and they'd ask, "who told you about 'Avatar'?" People got more and more serious about it. You'd ask about "Avatar" they'd yell at you, "what, you want to get killed?!?" One day, I decided I was going to go try and find "Avatar". I walked through the parking lot later and people were hunched over pointing at me...
Well, many years passed by and I never heard a word about "Avatar". Then, about seven or eight years ago, I was having dinner with a good friend of mine, Stephanie Austin. She's a big producer; she produced "Terminator 2," I mean, she's that caliber of producer. Well, "Avatar" comes up in our conversation and it turns out that she knows the story and all about "Avatar." Furthermore, she buys into the "Avatar" theory, sheâ(TM)s in that whole circle. The last thing she says to me about "Avatar" is, "we know who has 'Avatar'â¦Cameron has it."
Now, I know Cameron and he is a really strange guy. I saw a lot of the filming of "T-2", and I talked to Cameron a lot. Let me tell you, Cameron is really loopy, he thinks all of the stuff he makes movies about is true. He once said, "I'm making a film about the truth." According to Austin, Cameron had had "Avatar" for a while, but he, "couldn't find the right actors for it."
Keep in mind, this "Avatar" thing isn't a heaven versus hell kind of thing, there are layers of heavens, like onions. Now, I used to go on avatar hunts with students, and sometimes we wouldn't find them, and sometimes we would. One time, we went to the Martini Bar on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena and we found two female avatars. I swear, their eyes glowed. They looked like they had dropped out of heaven ten minutes ago. We talked to them for a while w
11 billion? is nothing. was Re:Hype, nothing (Score:5, Interesting)
When Christopher Columbus was trying to get funding for his expedition, he finally persuaded Queen Isabella and Ferdinand that the cost of three ships, provisions, crew pay all put together is less than what Her Majesty Q Isabella was spending to entertain visiting aristocratic guests for three weeks.
Re:Movies are so last century (Score:3, Interesting)
I partially disagree. The "old crop", i.e. very old, ala Quake, had some interesting properties the modern crop do not.
Quake I consider the first "true" 3D game because the tilt up and down were rendered in true 3D, whereas previous shooters like Duke Nukem, Doom, and Wolf 3D used a rendering trick that took out one of the matrix multiplications or something. This had the effect of reducing the rendering processor power needed (which was for 386 machines, with no hardware acceleration). But a side effect was you couldn't tilt up and down with proper rendering, though they did do a little distortion trick to simulate it, which got uglier the further you tilted.
Anyhoo, with the Quake software renderer (prior to the first Quake-capable 3D cards like 3dFX and, ultimately, Matrox PowerVR) you had a blocky scene, but with more CPU horsepower, you could get 60-70 fps, which was so smooth you lost any traces of stutter or flickering at the edges of notice. It became like looking through a window at a real world.
Nowadays you get that fast of an fps, but things just don't have that effect. And that's not including the immersion-breaking stutters as the system pages or loads a lot of new data into the card, or whatever, when you turn suddenly or a bunch of sparklies explode.
It's also possible the software/hardware/whatever cannot warp all the 3D triangles or whatever when you turn, at 70+ fps, even thought the hardware can render it that quickly. So you'd still get a kind of stutter as you turned even if the fps was through the roof. But I don't know enough about 3D programming anymore to know if this is an issue (wasn't this the T part of the "new" T&L cards 7 years ago or whatever?)
Re:yeah, no really... (Score:4, Interesting)
Films are 4D. The time dimension is represented by slices of time, or frames. You can look at any place along the movie's time dimension you want, by traveling along your own time dimension, the "real" one. You can, in theory, have multiple time dimensions just as multiple space dimensions.
Presumably, this is how everyone from Dr. Manhattan to The Prophets of DS9 view the world, though clearly things get a bit touchy when they interact with the film strip that is our reality. They have no way to predict the outcome before trying it, in our timeline, than we do. They just see the results instantly. Presumably they cannot travel along their own timeline to stop themselves from doing something they did in their own timeline's past.
Re:And when.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Crazy story.... (Score:3, Interesting)
virtual rollercoasters? (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyone ridden on those new virtual rollercoasters where the seats move? They're only recently moving to full 3D but when I first was on one in 1990 they were simply 2D and the people there were QUICK to point out that if you got too into the ride, you could look at the walls of the theatre and realize you weren't really there.
Seems silly except I had to look at the wall to prove I wasn't chasing a space ship through space.
The deal is that if you fool 2 of 3 senses(visual, proprioceptive and vestibular[last 2 are used for sensing motion]), the brain will fake the 3rd sense AND make the entire experience real for you. That's not *exactly* how it works but the complexity is a bit more than I have time for.
Sooo...I dunno..I'm still gonna wanna see it cause I love a good thrill and I've been a fan of 3D movies since I was a kid.
Re:yeah, no really... (Score:3, Interesting)
That's assuming that the fourth dimension is actually time. Most laypersons accept the fourth dimension this way, where most physicists, mathematicians, etc., view the fourth dimension as another dimension of space.
Read John Wright's The Chronicles of Chaos series for some of the best descriptions I've ever read of traveling/manipulating/using the fourth (or higher) dimension.