Rescued By Nerds

Like many others I have been following along with James Cameron’s gleeful hype about his first film in more than a decade, Avatar. I’ve seen all the interviews where he calls it a game changer and says movie going will never be the same. Well having seen the Avatar Day presentation for myself, I think he’s right.

I spent a good chunk of my Monday afternoon trying to secure a ticket to get into the 8/21 screening and only managed it from a backdoor link someone posted on a forum. Then there was the agonizing wait for a confirmation email. That came about four hours later and then I figured I could just look forward to the screening.

Whoops…

I get another email from Fox telling me that there were screw ups and that I needed to reconfirm. I did that as fast as I could and luckily got another confirmation. So I get to the theater and of course my name isn’t on their list even though I had a print out of their confirmation. The Fox people said this was happening a lot and not to worry I was still ok for the screening.

This is a lot of drama for a fifteen minute preview!

I want to digress for a minute back to my childhood. My dad and I, while on a summer vacation at the Jersey shore were looking for something to do on a Saturday night. He saw an ad for Aliens playing on the Ocean City Boardwalk. We had dinner and took the ride out to see the movie. I was dazzled like never before. I loved everything about the movie. The story, the effects, the weapons, the humanity from a non human character and woman being the savior of the day while Michael Biehn sits the final showdowns out. It was my first real exposure to James Cameron and I was on the hook.

So move forward nearly two decades and I start seeing online ramblings of Cameron coming back. I read about Jim’s vision for stereoscopic cineam and photo real effects. Huge advances in motion capture and emotional performances from CG characters. I’m a huge fan of cinematic innovation but I thought a lot of it was hype.

I read the reports from San Diego and started to think that there maybe really is something to this. I see the trailer and while really, really cool, I think maybe it really is hype. I still expect to enjoy the movie but I dial down my excitement.

Then I am sitting in the AMC Empire 25 IMAX theater in Manhattan. As the lights go down and we see Jim in 3D thanking us for being there and telling us what we are going to see I start to get an inkling for what he’s doing. This is 1950′s 3D where things are popping out into your face. This is designed to make you fall into the frame like you are there.

The first scene features all live actors in a room. That’s it. It’s jaw dropping. You feel like you are sitting in the room with them. Everything right there in front of you. It’s astonishing to say the least. And then it really takes off. The CG for Jake’s Avatar is amazing. The facial expressions, the sheer emotion on his face at regaining the ability to walk. I’ve never seen anything like it. The rest of the preview went by way too fast. I think this is the next step in film making and I was thrilled to have been given a chance at an early look.

A special thank you to Cameron and Fox. I think this is a brilliant way to get people to evangelize this movie. They invited people in and gave them a taste of what is to come. I’ll do my part signing it’s praises.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 23rd, 2009 at 8:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.