Staying true to science fiction

‘Avatar’ is the result of film director James Cameron’s deep interest in science, writes Karlin Lillington in Las Vegas

A STRONG interest in science and technology – and a little formal study in physics – led film director James Cameron to shoot the science fiction-oriented films that have become his hallmark, Avatar'screator says.

The award-winning filmmaker, who is also a formal adviser to Nasa and one of the world's leading experts in underwater exploration vehicles and remote-controlled robotic arms, told an audience in Las Vegas that a love of science as well as science fiction helped drive him to direct films such as The Abyss, Terminator, Alienand Avatar.

“I didn’t have a clue I would wind up being a filmmaker. What drove me then and still drives me now is curiosity.”

Cameron grew up in rural Canada collecting animals and exploring his surroundings.

“I guess I was a scientist without really knowing it,” he says. “Now, the word nerd had not been invented yet, but I was definitely that guy.”

As a child in the 1960s, with the US space programme riding high and an unexpected underwater world revealed in Jacques Cousteau’s television series, Cameron says “anything and everything seemed possible, and was”.

He also had a voracious appetite for science fiction. “I loved stories about space travel and other exotic worlds populated with strange creatures. We had to read it and imagine it in the dark theatre of our own minds.”

But it was new, serious films in the science fiction genre that really inspired him. " 2001: A Space Odysseywas basically like a religious experience for me."

Cameron began a college degree in physics but switched to English literature after getting a C grade in calculus. Then, he says, he just dropped out altogether and went to work doing a wide variety of jobs from truck driving to janitorial work to mechanics and welding, all of which he says became useful to his future career. Meanwhile, he was writing, drawing and painting at night.

It was when he fell in with friends in California who were making short films that he “got the film bug”. During the day he was doing office work – and “basically gave myself an education in optical effects by Xeroxing”.

He got to try his hand at his first short film after he “raised some money from a group of dentists looking for a tax shelter”. Using that film to open doors, he got a job working for “the king of B-movies”, Roger Corman.

Cameron says he convinced Corman he could come up with a technique for shooting front-screen projection shots – a visual effect where front-of-screen action happens before a pre-filmed background.

Mastering that technical problem started Cameron on a career of creating increasingly challenging special effects.

For Abyss, "we actually created the first soft surface creature using computer graphics", Cameron says. "This is when we began to grasp the possibility of computer effects."

With Terminator II, the "whole film hung on the computer graphics [CG] character. It was actually the computer graphics that drove it."

Cameron's increased focus on CG lead them to form the pioneering Hollywood special effects studio Digital Domain, which would become famous for the detailed and costly effects in Cameron's film Titanic.

“It was a really exciting time because we were creating many of the tools that are the industry standard today,” he says.

And it was at this time, on the threshold of a new computer graphics industry, that the groundwork for Avatarwas laid.

“I wanted to crack the holy grail of CG, which was to create fully human characters,” he says.

To challenge his special effects team, he wrote a story that included humanoid aliens in a fully developed alien world full of animals and activity, all designed to push them to the very edge of what he thought computer technology might be able to produce. “But I’d actually created too big a challenge,” he says.

He shelved the project and went to work on Titanic. With cheaper, powerful computers and software coming onto the market, the possibilities for special effects were expanding. And he learned that "imagination is a force that can will a reality into existence".

With the money he earned from Titanic, the largest grossing film in history until Avatar, he took time off to pursue personal interests such as developing deep-ocean exploration vehicles with his brother, a former aerospace engineer.

They also created small robots with cameras that he used to explore the actual sunken Titanic– a strange experience when he knew the whole layout of the ship.

"It was life imitating art imitating life. I also learned that a robotic craft can become an avatar. Your consciousness after many hours actually seems to inhabit the vehicle. For me, it was Avatar'for real'."

Around the same time he also went to work at developing a 3D camera. The first version was the size of a refrigerator, he says, but eventually he came up with a usable device. The problem was hardly any movie theatres had the technology to show a 3D film.

“I needed to make a 3D movie that they couldn’t ignore,” he says.

None of the scripts he had "seemed right, except this thing I'd written 10 years before, Avatar, but we'd have to be pushing the technology pretty far." It took 4½ years to make, "and the first 2½ years were just developing the technology. We didn't even work with an actor until 2½ years in."

In order to make the film, his company created a digital asset management database system with Microsoft which “saved our butts”, Cameron says. They had hundreds of versions of scenes with hundreds of “aspects”– individual elements within each scene.

Cameron also developed an entirely new way of animating the actors who became his 10ft tall blue aliens.

In the past, computerised motion-capture systems were used to create animated characters, placed over the background of the scene. The director only ever sees the human actor in the camera viewfinder and has to imagine how the final scene will look.

But with Avatar, a camera "facial rig" placed on the actors "provided an excellent record of the eyes and expression, and algorithms extracted data points from a film of the face".

This “facial capture process” meant the animators could do less work, more action could go into a scene and the animated aliens looked like the actors who were playing them.

In addition, computer gaming technology enabled Cameron to see the actors as blue aliens when he looked through the camera. Overall, “the goal was to produce an actor-driven performance for CG capture”, says Cameron, “and I was interfacing with a fantasy world and fantasy characters in real time.”

Cameron says they also shot high-definition reference takes of actors which became "absolutely critical" because they could use that footage to choose the best shots. The resulting film in its first rendition "looked like a video game" and was sent for post-production to New Zealand to the studio that did the special effects for Lord of the Rings.

“They would take the template and replace all the low-resolution assets with high-resolution assets” creating the photo-real version.

The final film had 2,950 shots and the post-production work was monumental, Cameron says – over 50 to 100 hours of post-production for each single frame. “It took over a petabyte of memory to store all the assets of the various scenes.”

Producing the final film “took a lot of computing power and a lot of double espressos”, Cameron jokes. However producing the film and conquering the technological challenges taught him that “anything we want to see, we can do. In fact, the only limitation is imagination.”