Origins

In 1994, director James Cameron wrote an 80-page scriptment for Avatar.^[9] In August 1996, he announced that after completing Titanic, he would film Avatar, which would make use of synthetic, or computer-generated, actors.^[11] The project would cost $100 million and involve at least six actors in leading roles "who appear to be real but do not exist in the physical world".^[48] Visual effects house Digital Domain, with whom Cameron has a partnership, joined the project, which was supposed to begin production in the summer of 1997 for a 1999 release.^[10] However, Cameron felt that the technology had not caught up with the story and vision that he intended to tell. He decided to concentrate on making documentaries and refining the technology for the next few years.
In June 2005, Cameron was announced to be working on a project tentatively titled Project 880, concurrently with another project, Battle Angel.^[49] It was later revealed in a Bloomberg BusinessWeek cover story that 20th Century Fox had fronted $10 million to Cameron to film a proof-of-concept clip for Avatar, which he showed to Fox execs in October 2005.^[50] By December, he said he planned to film Battle Angel first for a mid 2007 release, and to film Project 880 for a 2009 release.^[51] In February 2006, he said he had switched goals for the two film projects – Project 880 was now scheduled for 2007 and Battle Angel for 2009. He indicated that the release of Project 880 would possibly be delayed until 2008.^[52]
Later that February, Cameron revealed that Project 880 was "a retooled version of Avatar", a film that he had tried to make years earlier,^[53] citing the technological advances in the creation of the computer-generated characters Gollum, King Kong and Davy Jones.^[9] Cameron had chosen Avatar over Battle Angel after completing a five-day camera test in the previous year.^[54]

Development

Wikinews has related news: Elvish, Klingon and Na'vi: Constructed languages gain foothold in film

From January to April 2006, Cameron worked on the script and developed a culture for the film's aliens, the Na'vi. Their language was created by Dr. Paul Frommer, a linguist at USC.^[9] The Na'vi language has a vocabulary of about 1000 words, with some 30 added by Cameron. The tongue's phonemes include ejective consonants (such as the "kx" in "skxawng") that are found in the Amharic language of Ethiopia, and the initial "ng" that Cameron may have taken from New Zealand Māori.^[13] Actress Sigourney Weaver and the film's set designers met with Jodie S. Holt, professor of plant physiology at UC Riverside, to learn about the methods used by botanists to study and sample plants, and to discuss ways to explain the communication between Pandora's organisms depicted in the film.^[55]

Wikinews has related news: James Cameron to use Weta Digital for next film

In July 2006, Cameron announced that he would film Avatar for a mid 2008 release and planned to begin principal photography with an established cast by February 2007.^[56] The following August, the visual effects studio Weta Digital signed on to help Cameron produce Avatar.^[57] Stan Winston, who had collaborated with Cameron in the past, joined Avatar to help with the film's designs.^[58] Production design for the film took several years. The film had two different production designers, and two separate art departments, one of which focused on the flora and fauna of Pandora, and another that created human machines and human factors.^[59] In September 2006, Cameron was announced to be using his own Reality Camera System to film in 3-D. The system would use two high-definition cameras in a single camera body to create depth perception.^[60]
Fox was wavering because of its painful experience with cost overruns and delays on Cameron's previous picture, Titanic, even though Cameron rewrote Avatar's script to combine several characters together and offered to cut his fee in case the film flopped.^[50] Cameron installed a traffic light with the amber signal lit outside of co-producer Jon Landau's office to represent the film's uncertain future.^[50] In mid-2006, Fox told Cameron "in no uncertain terms that they were passing on this film," so he began shopping it around to other studios, and showed his proof-of-concept to Dick Cook (then chairman of The Walt Disney Company).^[50] However, when Disney attempted to take over, Fox exercised its right of first refusal.^[50] In October 2006, Fox finally agreed to commit to making Avatar after Ingenious Media agreed to back the film, which reduced Fox's financial exposure to less than half of the film's official $237 million budget.^[50] After Fox accepted Avatar, one skeptical Fox executive reportedly told Landau, "I don't know who's crazier for letting you take this on, us or you!"^[61]
In December 2006, Cameron described Avatar as "a futuristic tale set on a planet 200 years hence ... an old-fashioned jungle adventure with an environmental conscience [that] aspires to a mythic level of storytelling".^[62] The January 2007 press release described the film as "an emotional journey of redemption and revolution" and said the story is of "a wounded former Marine, thrust unwillingly into an effort to settle and exploit an exotic planet rich in biodiversity, who eventually crosses over to lead the indigenous race in a battle for survival". The story would be of an entire world complete with an ecosystem of phantasmagorical plants and creatures, and a native people with a rich culture and language.^[46]
Estimates put the cost of the film at about $280–310 million to produce and an estimated $150 million for marketing, noting that about $30 million in tax credits will lessen the financial impact on the studio and its financiers.^[14][15][16] However, a studio spokesperson, speaking with film website The Wrap, said that the budget "is $237 million, with $150 million for promotion, end of story".^[2]

Themes and inspirations

Avatar is primarily an action-adventure journey of self-discovery, in the context of imperialism and biodiversity.^[63] Cameron said his inspiration was "every single science fiction book I read as a kid", and that he was particularly striving to update the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter series.^[34] The director has acknowledged that Avatar shares themes with the films At Play in the Fields of the Lord and The Emerald Forest, which feature clashes between cultures and civilizations, and that the film shares connections with Dances With Wolves, where a battered soldier finds himself drawn to the culture he was initially fighting against.^[64]
In a 2007 interview with Time magazine, Cameron was asked about the meaning of the term avatar, to which he replied, "It's an incarnation of one of the Hindu gods taking a flesh form. In this film what that means is that the human technology in the future is capable of injecting a human's intelligence into a remotely located body, a biological body."^[8]
The look of the Na'vi—the humanoids indigenous to Pandora—was inspired by a dream that Cameron's mother had, long before he started work on Avatar. In her dream, she saw a twelve-foot-tall blue-skinned woman, which he thought was "kind of a cool image". He included similar creatures in his first screenplay (written in 1976 or 1977), which featured a planet with a native population of "gorgeous" tall blue aliens. These later became the basis for the Na'vi.^[63] On the specific reason for the choice of blue as their skin color, Cameron said "I just like blue. It's a good color ... plus, there's a connection to the Hindu deities,^[65] which I like conceptually."^[66]
For the film's floating "Hallelujah Mountains", the designers drew inspiration from "many different types of mountains, but mainly the karst limestone formations in China."^[68] According to production designer Dylan Cole, the fictional floating rocks were inspired by Mount Huang (also known as Huangshan) and the mountains of the Hunan province, among others around the world.^[68] Director Cameron had noted the influence of the Chinese peaks on the design of the floating mountains, saying at a December 2009 press conference in Beijing, "all we had to do was simply recreate Huangshan Mountain in outer space."^[69] When Cameron was asked if he got the idea for the floating mountains from an album cover of the rock band Yes, he replied with a laugh, "It might have been ... Back in my pot-smoking days."^[66]
To create the interiors of the human mining colony on Pandora, production designers visited the Noble Clyde Boudreaux^[70] drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico during June 2007. They photographed, measured and filmed every aspect of the rig, which was later replicated on-screen with photorealistic CGI during post-production.^[71]
For the love story between characters Jake and Neytiri, Cameron applied a star-crossed love theme, and acknowledged its similarity to the pairing of Jack and Rose from his film Titanic. Both couples come from radically different cultures that are contemptuous of their relationship and are forced to choose sides between the competing communities. "They both fall in love with each other, but they need to fight side-by-side, and so there's that kind of requirement to let the other person go in order to do what you need to do, which is kind of interesting," said Cameron.^[72] He felt that whether or not the Jake and Neytiri love story would be perceived as believable partially hinged on Neytiri's attractiveness. "So the physiological differences—the more alien we make them in the design phase, we just kept asking ourselves—basically, the crude version is: 'Well, would you wanna do it?'" stated Cameron. The all-male crew of artists were used to perfect the Na'vi attractiveness.^[73] Though Cameron felt Jake and Neytiri do not fall in love right away, Worthington and Saldana, the characters' portrayers, disagreed. Cameron said Worthington and Saldana "had a great chemistry" during filming.^[72]
At Comic Con 2009, Cameron told attendees that he wanted to make "something that has this spoonful of sugar of all the action and the adventure and all that". He wanted this to thrill him "as a fan" but also have a conscience "that maybe in the enjoying of it makes you think a little bit about the way you interact with nature and your fellow man".^[74] He added that "the Na'vi represent something that is our higher selves, or our aspirational selves, what we would like to think we are" and that even though there are good humans within the film, the humans "represent what we know to be the parts of ourselves that are trashing our world and maybe condemning ourselves to a grim future".^[74]

Some of these things you can't raise without being called unpatriotic, but I think it's very patriotic to question a system that needs to be corralled, or it becomes Rome. —James Cameron[75]

Cameron acknowledges that Avatar implicitly criticizes America's role in the War in Iraq and the impersonal nature of mechanized warfare in general.^[76] In reference to the use of the term shock and awe in the film, Cameron said, "We know what it feels like to launch the missiles. We don't know what it feels like for them to land on our home soil, not in America." He said in a later interview, "The film is definitely not anti-American."^[77] A scene in the film portrays the violent destruction of the towering Na'vi Hometree, which collapses in flames after a missile attack, coating the landscape with ash and floating embers. Asked about the scene's resemblance to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Cameron said he had been "surprised at how much it did look like September 11".^[76]

Filming

Principal photography for Avatar began in April 2007 in Los Angeles and Wellington, New Zealand. Cameron described the film as a hybrid with a full live-action shoot in combination with computer-generated characters and live environments. "Ideally at the end of the day the audience has no idea which they're looking at," Cameron said. The director indicated that he had already worked four months on nonprincipal scenes for the film.^[79] The live action was shot with a modified version of the proprietary digital 3-D Fusion Camera System, developed by Cameron and Vince Pace.^[80] In January 2007, Fox had announced that 3-D filming for Avatar would be done at 24 frames per second despite Cameron's strong opinion that a 3-D film requires higher frame rate to make strobing less noticeable.^[81] According to Cameron, the film is composed of 60% computer-generated elements and 40% live action, as well as traditional miniatures.^[82]
Motion-capture photography would last 31 days at the Hughes Aircraft stage in Playa Vista, Los Angeles, California.^[54][83] Live action photography began in October 2007 at Stone Street Studios in Wellington, New Zealand, and was scheduled to last 31 days^[84]. More than a thousand people worked on the production.^[83] In preparation of the filming sequences, all of the actors underwent professional training specific to their characters such as archery, horseback riding, firearms, and hand to hand combat. They also received language and dialect training in the Na'vi language created for the film.^[78] Prior to shooting the film, Cameron also sent the cast to the jungle in Hawaii^[85] to get a feel for a rainforest setting before shooting on the soundstage.^[78]
During filming, Cameron made use of his virtual camera system, a new way of directing motion-capture filmmaking. The system displays an augmented reality on a monitor, placing the actor's virtual counterparts into their digital surroundings in real time, allowing the director to adjust and direct scenes just as if shooting live action. According to Cameron, "It's like a big, powerful game engine. If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can. I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature and go through it on a 50 to 1 scale."^[86] Using conventional techniques, the complete virtual world cannot be seen until the motion-capture of the actors is complete. Cameron said this process does not diminish the value or importance of acting. On the contrary, because there is no need for repeated camera and lighting setups, costume fittings and make-up touch-ups, scenes do not need to be interrupted repeatedly.^[87] Cameron described the system as a "form of pure creation where if you want to move a tree or a mountain or the sky or change the time of day, you have complete control over the elements".^[88] He gave fellow directors Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson a chance to test the new technology.^[62] Spielberg said, "I like to think of it as digital makeup, not augmented animation.... Motion capture brings the director back to a kind of intimacy that actors and directors only know when they're working in live theater."^[87] Spielberg and George Lucas were also able to visit the set to watch Cameron direct with the equipment.^[89][90][91]
To film the shots where CGI interacts with live action, a unique camera referred to as a "simulcam" was used, a merger of the 3-D fusion camera and the virtual camera systems. While filming live action in real time with the simulcam, the CGI images captured with the virtual camera or designed from scratch, are superimposed over the live action images and shown on a small monitor, making it possible for the director to instruct the actors how to relate to the virtual material in the scene.^[78][92]

Visual effects

A number of revolutionary visual effects techniques were used in the production of Avatar. According to Cameron, work on the film had been delayed since the 1990s to allow the techniques to reach the necessary degree of advancement to adequately portray his vision of the film.^[10][11] The director planned to make use of photorealistic computer-generated characters, created using new motion-capture animation technologies he had been developing in the 14 months leading up to December 2006.^[86]
Innovations include a new system for lighting massive areas like Pandora's jungle,^[94] a motion-capture stage or "volume" six times larger than any previously used, and an improved method of capturing facial expressions, enabling full performance capture. To achieve the face capturing, actors wore individually made skull caps fitted with a tiny camera positioned in front of the actors' faces; the information collected about their facial expressions and eyes is then transmitted to computers.^[95] According to Cameron, the method allows the filmmakers to transfer 100% of the actors' physical performances to their digital counterparts.^[96] Besides the performance capture data which were transferred directly to the computers, numerous reference cameras gave the digital artists multiple angles of each performance.^[97] Richard Baneham, an animation supervisor for the film, noted one scene in particular that presented a unique challenge for his crew and said, “There’s a moment at the end of the movie when Jake is picked up by Neytiri, and we finally see Jake as a human and Neytiri as a Na’vi, and they interact. That you have a live action character and a CG character actually touching is a huge deal. We were invested to the point where the right amount of shadow was cast, including the right amount of bounce light from the human character reacting on the Na’vi’s skin.”^[98]
The lead visual effects company was Weta Digital in Wellington, New Zealand, at one point employing 900 people to work on the film^[99]. To render Avatar, Weta used a 10,000-square foot server farm making use of 4,000 Hewlett-Packard servers with 35,000 processor cores.^[100] The render farm occupies the 193rd to 197th spots in the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. Creating the Na'vi characters and the virtual world of Pandora required over a petabyte of digital storage,^[101] and each minute of the final footage for Avatar occupies 17.28 gigabytes of storage.^[102] To help finish preparing the special effects sequences on time, a number of other companies were brought on board, including Industrial Light & Magic, which worked alongside Weta Digital to create the battle sequences. ILM was responsible for the visual effects for many of the film's specialized vehicles and devised a new way to make CGI explosions.^[103] Joe Letteri was the film's visual effects general supervisor.^[104]

Music and soundtrack

Composer James Horner scored the film, his third collaboration with Cameron after Aliens and Titanic.^[105] Horner recorded parts of the score with a small chorus singing in the alien language Na'vi in March 2008.^[106] He also worked with Wanda Bryant, an ethnomusicologist, to create a music culture for the alien race.^[107] The first scoring sessions were planned to take place in Spring 2009.^[108] During production, Horner promised Cameron that he would not work on any other project except for Avatar and reportedly worked on the score from four in the morning till ten at night throughout the process. He stated in an interview, "Avatar has been the most difficult film I have worked on and the biggest job I have undertaken."^[109] Horner composed the score as two different scores merged into one. He first created a score that reflected the Na'vi way of sound and then combined it with a separate "traditional" score to drive the film.^[78] British singer Leona Lewis was chosen to sing the theme song for the film, called "I See You". An accompanying music video, directed by Jake Nava, premiered December 15, 2009, on MySpace.^[110]