It's like they're cascading right into my fucking face!

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y16...s/emot-wth.gif

Really rainy there.

Don't forget all the banshee piss. Also, it's not like a mountain would stop having an aquifer just because it's floating. It's just that the scale is way off; the waterfalls would be too big for the "peaks" even if the mountain clumps were on the ground.

Yea, but it looks fuckin' cool.

I finally saw this last night to see what the fuss was about and I have to say, this movie was hyped for the right reasons.
The story was pretty predictable but the overall impression with the characters and visual effects is what made the movie as a whole. I didn't really like main villain because he was a generic Disney type of character but I guess for this type of movie, I would take any villain just to keep the movie going.
I actually thought this kind of movie was going to be 60% real people with some boring talk about the planet but the majority of the movie was with the Navi people which was quite a surprise to me. I didn't have any idea of what i was walking into with this movie and I think because of that, I just freaking loved it. The movie replayed in my mind as I went to sleep @_@

I saw it in Digital 3d, nothing really impressive from what I saw, just a few flies or leaves popping up and the occasional holographic screens. Or maybe I just have an eye problem.

The thing about the 3D was they deliberately did NOT go for shoving the 3D in your face. The 3D just became part of the movie, and about 20 minutes in you're easily able to just treat it as a part of the movie. It made it more like you were there without constantly having a "WOOOOOOOAH THEYRE SHOVING THE SPEAR IN MY FACE THIS IS SO COOL" moment every 5 minutes to remind you.

Floaty seed pods. 'S all I'm sayin.

The only thing that bothered me was when protruding foreground objects were out of focus, because my instinct is to try and focus on the floaty bits jutting out towards my face, and it feels weird to not be able to. That's the point, I guess--I'm not supposed to be looking there--and maybe the impulse will go away once I get used to seeing 3D movies.

But, if a film's going to be in 3D, wouldn't it make sense to have a really deep focus and let your eyes do the work naturally? I know playing with focus has been in a cinematographer's toolbox for forever, but it just doesn't make sense to me outside of a 2D projection.

Maybe dudes smarter than me who know more about the technology and filmmaking could explain why this would be a bad idea.

I had a headache during this and for about 3 hours afterwards.

Terrible script IMO.

I was surprised how little the 3d bothered me even though I've got cokebottle glasses. Generally 3d stuff gives me a pretty bad headache.

That's something that bugs me about 3D, there seems to be a "right way" to watch a 3D movie. Since when is there a "right way" to look at an image? My sister got headaches when she saw it because she's used to looking at the whole screen as opposed to one particular object, and I found that slightly annoying as well.

Some of the shots were really well done though, like the water droplet in the opening because it was just a way of deep focus (like Worm was saying) but more XTREME

Will be interesting to see what someone else does with the technology, but Avatar didn't sell me on it.

Fun movie though, pew pew, explosions :D

Feel free to correct me here, but it seems to me like that comes from an issue with what people expect from 3D movies versus what actually physically can happen.

In the real world, you can focus on whatever you want to because everything exists in 3 actual dimensions.

In a normal movie, cinematographers use changes in focus to draw your eye to what they want you to watch, and just like an eye, a camera can't focus on everything all at once (well, it CAN, a technique called deep focus, but it's not a popular method these days. Citizen Kane used it extensively.) This was one of the big advances that WALL-E nailed, actually, because they spent a lot of time focusing on depth of field and having focus on specific objects. The temptation when you CAN focus on everything is to do it, but most people expect the selective focus that other movies use.

Anyway, a 3-D movie only APPEARS 3-D because of a combination of how it's being displayed on the screen and the glasses you're wearing. It tricks your eyes into seeing things as closer or farther away than they actually are. In the end, though, it is still a 2 dimensional image, and just as you can't willfully focus on the background in a 2-D movie if you don't want to see Harrison Ford staring wistfully in that new movie he's in that sucks, you can't willfully change the focus on this "3-dimensional" image because in the end the choice was made for you and it's on that flat screen in front of you.

Thought this was funny. I still haven't seen it, unfortunately.

YouTube Video

Very good point. I guess the point I was making was that I found if I didn't (and this is just me personally) focus directly on the face of a subject that was directly in focus I would start to get a headache. If I was watching Citizen Kane like you mentioned, I would probably be tempted to look at the subject, around the frame but also at the whole frame to appreciate the composition as a whole, which I found I couldn't do with any of the 3D films I watched. Well, also because even in non-movie watching mode my eyes like to flick around and take things. So even though I'm not staring directly at the elements of the frame that are out of focus, I could still see them all in a way. This gave me a headache when I saw both Up and Avatar in 3D.

So yes, I appreciate the cinematographer is using the same kind of tricks to guide your eye, but I think the technique isn't mastered yet. The cinematographer even said something to the effect that he had a much harder time directing the audience's eye using the 3D stuff because of the depth of field.

Since you seem to be a cinematography guy, you'd probably appreciate the article they did on it in American Cinematographer. Pretty interesting. I guess the problem was the cameras had a limited ability to put things into a shallow depth of field, so they compensated with the lighting and set dressing by taking things out of the background. In that sense, it'd be interesting to watch the film in 2D just to see what all of that looks like without the 3D effect guiding it along.

Avatar has become the highest grossing film of all time.

Post your reasons on why this is a grave injustice to art and the world at large below this line:

____________________________________________

Why would art care?

http://i68.photobucket.com/albums/i1...Picture1-2.png

You didn't really leave enough room to approach the topic with any seriousness but I think that sums it up alright.

You know, I'm pretty sure that the Harry Potter books have made more money than War and Peace but you see surprisingly little internet nerd-rage about that.

Who actually gives a fuck if Avatar is popular? Big studios are in the business of making money and they're very good at it, that's why they make films they think will be popular and throw a lot of advertising at them. Soap operas are often the most watched programmes on tv for the same reason, if you want something to have wide appeal, you need to aim it at the lowest common denominator.

Anyway, Sprout, didn't you say you liked Avatar in your journal? That you have an opinion at all suggests you paid to see it, in which case you have exactly zero grounds on which to complain about how much money it's made.

Whoa there, I loved Avatar and I'm not at all complaining about it making that much money. I never would have predicted it would surpass Titanic, but I'm stoked to see that it did. My snide comment was not meant to be an attack on the film, but rather a nudge to the people who haven't stopped bitching about how terrible the movie is since before it was even released.

Furthermore:

There are more than a few people on here who stomp on those books whenever they get the opportunity to. Maybe the Potter nerd-rage is exclusive only to GFF?

Oh, sorry then, got the wrong end of the stick.

Carry on.

Hey, come on, the movie ain't that bad. Then again, I have to admit that I also like Michael Bay flicks :/

Also, I wonder if Cameron played the game Albion

wtf?

Well, considering that film is a visual medium, it's not surprising that one of the most visually impressive movies winds up being one of the biggest films of the year.

It's kind of like complaining when a song has dumb lyrics. Yeah, sure, good lyrics can certainly help a song, and some great ones can be made just by being very poetic, but there's still a place for shit like Bang the Drum.

I still haven't seen the movie, so can't really comment on how good or bad it is, but I wonder if the enormous financial success of his last two films (Avatar, Titantic, natch) will give Cameron enough leeway to make Battle Angel Alita without a lot of Executive Meddling ?