[Movie] Avatar (2009) - BZ wants your nub

It's a shame 3D cinemas might speed up pushing out traditional film projectors since film prints are still higher definition (they just require more training of projectionists which wont happen...)

But hopefully this is the film that moves 3D from a gimmick to something that actually uses the 3D to tell the story as opposed to it just being, but until it does that, it's just another gimmick. For instance, for those who saw Up in 3D did it make a difference in how you perceived the story versus watching the 2D film print? I'm guessing not, but I haven't seen it, so I could be wrong. But I suppose moving pictures were also a gimmick back in the day, so I'm on the fence.

How ya doing, buddy?

The fact that the early press/fan screenings of Avatar are producing a resounding: "OMG AMAZINGS!" isn't really all that shocking, is it? That's what you get for picking and choosing your audience. I don't care how amazing the CG/3D looks, if the story isn't good then it's still going to be a crap film.

That said, I'm still probably going to see it to see what all the buzz is about...*sigh* I'm such a fool.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by quazi

Here's the original scriptment to which I was referring: Avatar Scriptment by James Cameron

Summary of changes here: PROJECT 880: THE AVATAR THAT ALMOST WAS

I can honestly that sounds like a much better movie. When I said that I felt the film was dumbed down to make it more accessible to its PG-13 audience, it was changes like these that reflect it.

The spectacle wasn't taken out of the film...just the interesting parts. Like seeing Earth in the shitter, and implying that the Avatars they are piloting are actually conscious. More horrifying, but interesting. Doesn't have to be arty to be a bit less generic than the final script was.

Oh welly. Plus:

Quote:

There are dozens more species in Project 880, some of which are truly weird. The slinger throws its head at enemies; the head is actually its young

That would have been for some entertaining cinema methinks.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

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

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by Merv Buffet

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.

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.

I was speaking idiomatically.