Production

How was the film produced to appeal to the audience?

• Since 1994, Avatar has been in development, with an 80 page script written by James Cameron. The film was supposed to be released in 1999 after Titatnic but according to Cameron "technology needed to catch up" with his vision of the film.
• In early 2006, Cameron developed the script and worked on finer details such as the language and the culture of Pandora.
• In order to appeal to the audience and to make the world of Pandora seem as real as possible, Cameron went to extreme lengths to make the language authentic (he worked with a linguist) and when creating the inhabitants of Pandora, he paid great attention to detail, using lots of modern technology:

- Motion capture animation technology: The process of recording movement and translating that movement into a digital model. It records the action of human actors and uses their movements to create digital character models in 2D or 3D.

- "The Volume" - a motion capture stage six times larger than any ever used before. This was used to capture accurate facial expressions. This worked by having the actors wear skull caps fitted with a small camera, capturing their facial expressions and eyes and feeding this information to computers. This allowed actors to transfer around 95% of their performances to their digital forms ie. their avatars.

Evidently, new and modern 3D technology played a large role in making Avatar the massive success it is today. Through word of mouth, discussions about the amazing new technology generated a massive hype around the movie way before it came out in cinemas. As 3D technology has not been used that much in movies, it appeals to audiences, especially those who have never seen a movie in 3D before.

"Ideally at the end of the day the audience has no idea which they're looking at." - Cameron.

The live action was shot with a modified version of a digital 3D Fusion camera system which Cameron had developed himself with the help of Vince Pace - Cameron said that the film consisted of 60% of computer generated elements and 40% live action. The digital high definition camera was used on other movies such as Spy Kids 3D and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3D.

In order to create the human mining colony on Pandora, production designers measured, filmed and photographed every aspect of the Noble Clyde Boudreaux drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico during June 2007 - this was replicated on screen with photorealistic CGI. More than a thousand people worked on production.

By Ella and Natasha