Updated with addi­tional info on Simulcam, James Horner’s inspi­ra­tion from Indonesian music and more links.

“Walking through a dream I see you, By light and dark­ness breath­ing hope of new life, Now I live through you and you through me, enchanted, I pray in my heart that this dream never ends.“

If I shall make a movie, I will not do it any other way. Avatar, opened last week has brought a new sen­sa­tion to the fes­tive sea­son; James Cameron’s first after he spent nearly a decade scrap­ing the under­world and cre­at­ing doc­u­men­taries — is noth­ing sort of spec­tac­u­lar, an out of this world imag­i­na­tion with a down to earth sto­ry­telling is every direc­tors’ and movie­go­ers’ dream come true. He and the (rumored) $300 mil­lion team of artists, cam­eras & com­puter engi­neers has closed the chap­ter of gen­er­a­tion: ‘Star Wars’ & opened a new page in the cin­ema his­tory book.

If the story of a man falls in love with the indige­nous’ first woman sounds remotely famil­iar and how their love began at the bat­tle field with a hap­pily ever after end­ing might sounds like a Disney movie, but make no mis­take, this is not Pocahontas. This is a story of good that will ulti­mately tri­umph greed, love over­whelms evil.

James Cameron has clearly grown, bor­row­ing from the ancient Hindu scrip­ture, the movie bor­rows the con­cept of the ‘borrowed-body’ to narate the often dis­tant voice of wis­dom, deep within the blue skin & the big yel­low eyes of the Na’vi lies a sim­ple fact that we as human must know; we are all con­nected as one.

Clearly, we have dis­tant our­selves from nature…so far, it is impos­si­ble for most of us to rec­og­nize the truth, Pandora might be just an imag­i­na­tion of one cre­ative soul, but every­thing that we live on earth—as real as it is, as close as we are—yet, are often gone unno­ticed that we sim­ply destroy every­thing that is given for us. Avatar attempts to cor­rect that mis­take, the con­cept of God, prophecy and reli­gion doesn’t exist but love, courage & faith become a tra­di­tion that is nur­tured through­out the Na’vi that bounds every each of them to their beau­ti­ful planet.

How does one cre­ate a real­is­tic world?

There’s a fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent con­cept of dimen­sion in Avatar, it’s a unique philo­soph­i­cal iter­a­tion on how they rep­re­sent the world of Pandora onto a vir­tual 3D on 2D screen.

Jon Landau, Produser, & Cameron’s part­ner since Titanic:

It’s not a world com­ing out of a win­dow, it’s a win­dow into a world.

I was one of the lucky souls who were at the cen­ter stage of it; for nearly 3 hours on the night of Dec 17, I was blown away by what I could only describe as an out-of-this-world sen­sa­tion, I wouldn’t be sur­prised as I have learned prior to the open­ing night that almost every­thing that was used to make Avatar was entirely new to the film­mak­ing indus­try, the tech­nol­ogy, the approach & the equip­ment was prac­ti­cally invented for this movie.

Another rea­son why this movie looks & feels dif­fer­ent than any other is the way the com­puter gen­er­ated imag­ing (CGI) are pro­duced; instead of mov­ing wire­frame 3D mod­els and cal­cu­lat­ing the lights & shad­ing of its tex­ture, Avatar uses a per­for­mance cap­tur­ing technology—a com­mon tech­nique of inject­ing live in videogames—actors are rigged with motion detec­tion equip­ment on a sound­stage with live-size mark­ing of the scenes they are per­form­ing for, no more dub­bing or mouse gen­er­ated move­ment; with a Cameron made dig­i­tal viewfinder & the pro­duc­tion team’s bril­liant soft­ware ‘simul­cam’, the direc­tor is see­ing the actor’s per­for­mance with a real­time ren­der­ing of how the movie should look in post pro­duc­tion, direc­tors have to wait for months for what Cameron see in real­time. This solu­tion does not only allow Cameron to cre­ate a real life look­ing cam­era move­ments, but also allows the actors to per­form live on-stage and ani­mate & mimic they’re own dig­i­tal char­ac­ter as they would have done in real life.

James Cameron:

It’s immer­sive. It wraps the movie around you. It’s not nec­es­sar­ily just for kids’ films either. It works in a dra­matic sense because it gives you a height­ened sense of real­ity. Whatever you’re watch­ing has a kind of a turbo-charged level of audi­ence involve­ment. In a sci­ence fic­tion film like this one, you’ll be able to inhabit that world, not just watch it but be in it. I think peo­ple want that. If peo­ple are going to get out of their homes and go to the cin­ema, the cin­ema bet­ter show them some­thing it hasn’t in the past. (Q&A with James Cameron, Jan 11, 2007 by Rebecca Winters Keegan)

It is over­whelm­ing. The num­ber of tech­ni­cal excel­lence and inven­tions is so mas­sive, it is over­whelm­ing to even read the data, the new PACE/CAMERON Fusion Camera System, the rich sound & melody writ­ten by James Horner and how he com­mit­ted his 1.5 years invent­ing a new sound world exclu­sively for Pandora, includ­ing a sound orig­i­nated from my beloved home, Indonesia:

There were a lot of vocal sounds I took from var­i­ous places. These were odd vocal sounds that I would manip­u­late dig­i­tally and there were inter­est­ing flutes, for instance, from South America and Finland that I wanted to be more abstract. I also have instru­ments invented from scratch. They were pro­grammed. There were a lot of instru­ments that sound like flutes of dif­fer­ent sorts, but they were com­bined with gamelan-sounding instru­ments. The game­lan is Balinese. The word itself means ”orches­tra.” The indi­vid­ual game­lan instru­ments are these bell-like sounds. A lot of the per­cus­sion for “Avatar” is gamelan-based or sounds gamelan-based. So this has this sort of qual­ity of ring­ing bells, like Indonesian music. It’s a very pretty fusion of dif­fer­ent worlds that gives the place itself a qual­ity that is mag­i­cal. Using it for per­cus­sion, rather than drums or other things, gives a sort of mag­i­cal glow to every­thing. And as I said there were a lot of instru­ments that I invented and worked on with my pro­grams. I was very particular.

Read the rest of the inter­view here

The immen­sity of the efforts also comes at the end, an end­less list of tal­ented souls appears in the credit title that scrolls with Leony Lewis’ bril­liant voice singing:

“Then my heart was never open, and my spirit never free; To the world that you have shown me; But my eyes could not envi­sion; All the col­ors of love and of life ever more…ever more.”

Nothing has ever come so close for a story, graph­ics, cin­e­matog­ra­phy, tech­nol­ogy, imag­i­na­tion & cre­ativ­ity encap­su­lated to a 165-minute work of art, James Cameron’s Avatar is a must see, so per­fect, it’s almost spiritual.

I see you, James. I see you.

A big pile of selected links (worth read­ing) about Avatar:

Full Credits for Avatar
http://blogs.sundaymercury.net/anorak-city/2009/12/avatar-how-many-people-does-it.html

Artists work­ing on Avatar
http://mattejourney.blogspot.com/2009/03/artists-working-on-avatar.html

Behind the scenes from Avatar
http://www.kansascity.com/936/gallery/1632020.html

Creating the world of James Cameron’s “Avatar“
http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2009/12/16/landau/index.html

Inventing Effects to Create the Avatar Universe
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/11/ff_avatar_movie/2/

The tech­no­log­i­cal secrets of James Cameron’s new film Avatar
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/aug/20/3d-film-avatar-james-cameron-technology

A Brief Look at the Technological Advancements in James Cameron’s Avatar
http://www.firstshowing.net/2008/08/09/a-brief-look-at-the-technological-advancements-in-james-camerons-avatar/

‘Avatar’ 3-D expe­ri­ence aims to immerse view­ers in dis­tant world
http://broadcastengineering.com/hdtv/avata-3-dexperience-aims-immerse-viewers-distant-world-1201/

Moving Pictures: The sto­ries behind movies
http://www.movingpicturesmagazine.com/reviews/movies/avatar

Movie stills from Yahoo! Movies
http://movies.yahoo.com/photos//gallery/1924/avatar-stills#photo0

Technology behind 3D — CNET
http://news.cnet.com/2300-1026_3-6212076–1.html?tag=mncol

With “Avatar,” Technology Has Never Looked So Human in Film
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jose-antonio-vargas/with-avatar-technology-ha_b_399711.html

and a bonus.…

A Beautiful col­lec­tion of Hi-res (Full HD Size) Wallpaper for your desk­top
(Google Link, BitTorrent required)

Avatar’s lat­est extended HD trailer