Fantasy fulfilled
The countdown has begun to what is possibly the most eagerly awaited film of the year: James Cameron's Avatar.
Twelve years after his last feature film Titanic - which still holds the joint record for most Oscars won - the director has tested the limits of movie-making technology with the futuristic thriller he conceived nearly 15 years ago.
Inspired by, as Cameron puts it, 'every single science fiction book I read as a kid', Avatar is full of creatures 'who appear to be real but do not exist in the physical world'. He started planning for the film when Titanic was release, but funding and technology limits put the project on hold.
Then came a series of astonishing 'humanised' computer-generated characters, like Gollum, King Kong and Davy Jones, giving Cameron the confidence that the latest in motion-capture technology could help him to realise his vision.
Merging CG characters and live actors, Avatar tells the story of a former Marine, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington). Although confined to a wheelchair, he has been given an arduous task: to infiltrate the three-metre-tall, blue-skinned Na'vi, the indigenous people of Pandora. When he succeeds, he must harvest a precious stone found there. A human-Na'vi hybrid, or 'avatar', is created as a disguise that will also enable him to walk.
The longer Jake stays with the kind Na'vi people in their unspoiled world, the more he feels at home. His budding romance with Na'vi princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) also makes it hard to go ahead with his excavation mission.
In order to make the CG characters believable, the CGI-savvy director used the most advanced motion capture technology available, and transferred as much as 95 per cent of the cast's actions to their digital counterparts, pushing the technology past regular motion-capture to 'emotion-capture'.
One of the best visual effects and post-production houses in the business was brought in to help. The Oscar-winning Weta Digital earned major recognition for their out-of-this-world achievements: creating Middle Earth for the Lord of the Rings trilogy; the soulful King Kong; and breathtaking District 9.
The director also invited legendary visual effects supervisor and make-up artist, the late Stan Winston onto the team. The four-time Oscar winner was behind the effects on the Terminator and Jurassic Park series, and Iron Man, and Avatar was the penultimate project before his death.
As he did for Titanic, Oscar-winning James Horner has written the movie theme song, and recruited big belter Leona Lewis to sing it. Wait for the credits to decide if the song is another classic in the making.
Avatar opens December 17
