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James Cameron was kind enough to see that his latest offering was subtitled on time for a worldwide release, meaning Avatar came out in Japan a month ago. Now the shockwave has passed ORAZ believes it deserves a little calm consideration. We hope you’ll bear with us for a second if we tell you that we believe that the film industry, and indeed the electronics industry, will have to be reconsidered anew in the post-Avatar era. Allow us to justify that hyperbolic preamble. |
At a modern-day trade show, no matter whether you want to sell a 50 inch 3D plasma TV or a wristwatch, standard practice has become to show a clip of Avatar to get the audiences starry-eyed with anticipation. You like Avatar? Buy our ebook reader! As such every commercial clip of Avatar has been used time and again and audiences have been utterly overexposed, nay inured, to its smurfesque charms.
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So what exactly was its impact? Well the answer is huge. Immeasurably, whiplash inducingly, electronics market changingly chunky. Movies like Avatar drive customer demand and customer demand convinces electronics manufacturers that 3D blu-ray players and 50 inch HD TVs can land in enough living rooms to be worthwhile. The biggest thing holding Avatar back from being photorealistic is the strobing that occurs when characters move at 24fps. Digital projecters can run at 60fps and Cameron is pushing the industry to flick the switch up a gear. This is a small example of the way Avatar is changing the fabric of film. |
Gamers have been demanding these frame rates for years. The old truism that the human eye cannot register the difference between 24fps and 60 simply will not stand anymore; the boys and girls can tell. Net result? 24fps will soon go the way of the silent movie. A quaint reminder of a bygone age. Similarly non-3D TVs will soon be like the cathode ray tube. You have to endure it when you visit an elderly relative but you really only appreciate it when it’s safely behind bars in a museum.
In short, without movies like Avatar the future landscape of the 21st century late capitalist’s living room would look extremely different. Technology doesn’t drive James Cameron, James Cameron drives technology. The electronics manufacturers will step up the production of 3D home entertainment when the Lord of the Rings trilogy comes out and gives them a reason to do so. But when these changes filter back into the storytelling, how will this affect the kind of screenplays that get greenlit?
| It’s a no-brainer that a smart man like Cameron would have to base Avatar’s on the timeliest archetypes he had to hand. Every element of the story is tried and tested because Avatar is a business expansion proposal in the form of entertainment. It is a technological pitch. It would be too unwieldy to offer the public a highly complex and groundbreaking narrative as well as a new way of seeing movies. Similarly it would be pointless to try to convince studios and electronics manufacturers that the future could herald HD 3D bio-luminescent environments; it’s better to just prove it with a story whose timeless themes touch millions. The only way to bring about the change you desire is to make your business proposal a multi-million dollar franchise. |
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| Franchise is the key word here. With Avatar Cameron has openly stated that his intention was to take cinema to the next (technological) level with performance capture and 3D technologies, but the narrative is a fairly bald statement of invasion and capitalism. This is the establishment of a technological stable and a virtual world, more than it is a story that was aching to be told. Cameron has created a world to which any creative person in any medium can return to make another installment and be guaranteed a profit. It seems clear that pornography and Star Trek are popular with nerds because they represent an unrealistically accommodating world in which the underdog would prefer to live. Cases of post-Avatar depression in those who wish to return to Cameron’s Eden-like garden prove that pandora fits that definition nicely. Fans are literally crying to go back and are already being presented with opportunities to do so across all media. |
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So what was so different about the “filming” process? A live render of the actors of about the quality of a video game was available on the handheld “virtual camera” which Cameron and co used for “capturing” (no longer filming) the movie, but to render the photoreal CG for the finished movie took 30-100 hours per frame. This is bleeding edge technology that is still expensive and time consuming. As the technology improves the time taken should decrease but for now this technology is reserved by the highest funded projects. Peter Jackson was turned down by Weta, his own company, when filming District 9 because the workload created by Avatar was too great. |
Future uses of Weta performance capture and 3D technology include the Spielberg/Jackson co-production of Tin-tin, which will be captured in pseudo-comic book-style 2D in 3D (yes that’s 3D 2D) and is expected to be yet another visual step forward into the paradigm-shifted visual world that will forever be associated with Avatar. Interestingly Cameron’s Terminator 2 and Spielberg’s Jurassic Park ushered in the last visual paradigm shift into CGI, which has now become standard on TV shows and dino-documentaries (albeit not quite matching the quality of Jurassic Park). It seems it is destined to be the same pair in the same order who again drag their backers kicking and screaming into a brave, new and ever more costly world.
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The other big use of Weta’s technique is set to be Jackson’s forthcoming replacement for Universal Studios’ King Kong ride. Kong himself was sadly lost in a fire at the theme park so Jackson is now working on a project that will involve a Universal tram making it’s way to a darkened soundstage onto a motion simulator base. From that point the tram will surrounded on all sides by 8 screens onto which 8 images from 8 virtual cameras will be displayed by 8 projecters. The passengers will have a wrap around view of Kong battling T-rexes. Kong and his foes will buffet the visitors while they watch on. Audiences will enjoy 4k video running at 60 fps while wearing 3D glasses. As Kong struggles with the Jurassic giants the audience will be blasted with the hot stinky breath of their exertions and will be showered with goo from a simian right hook to their slavering maws. |
The ride, due to open next summer, perfectly exemplifies how the industry is adapting to the challenge of internet piracy and peer-to-peer sharing technologies. Rather than try to solidify a single distribution technology, which has so far gone as smoothly as the proverbial bacchanalian revelry in the distillery, Cameron and co are abandoning standard TVs and DVDs to offer a new form of entertainment. Continuing the high-concept, roller-coaster ride plus merchandising model first established by Star Wars in the 70s, the left-right combo of performance capture and 3D will free actors from the constraints of the physical universe and present entertainment which blurs the line between film and theme park ride. DVD sales no longer fund movies, so movies have begun to offer an experience that cannot be replicated at home. If one wishes to experience it, It simply has to be paid for.
You may have already heard some bemoan the lack of scenes that maximise the 3D technology in the recent spate of Hollywood offerings. On the other hand you may have read complaints about the new habit of stopping the narrative dead in it’s tracks, a la Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol, for an extended 3D ride down a sewer pipe. Watching that particular Dickens interpretation without 3D glasses is a truly baffling experience in which one must simply endure lengthy scenes designed to capitalise on a technology not available to the viewer. The wait for the narrative to pick up again is akin to watching someone else ride a roller-coaster. One can only imagine what the experience was supposed to feel like.
| In short this means that traditional filmmaking does not sit well with this expensive new technology. Why would one make a Wilde or a Good Will Hunting in 3D at Weta’s studios? The expensive production process is wasted on anything but sewer dives and soaring through the sky on a dinosaur’s back. The content and stories that viewers are offered by Hollywood will have to change to adapt to this new retail model. |
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The reverberations of this will reach the living rooms and bedrooms of the developed world as standard definition analogue TVs are replaced by HD flat panel LCD 3D behemoths. Anything less than 50 inches will fail to create the desired effect. Ikea’s furniture range will shortly follow suit.
So where is the venue for non-3D or “traditional” filmmaking. Well with the arrival of 1080P video on modern SLR cameras, starting with Canon’s remarkable 5D Mark II, film is now the playground of the prosumer. Now that the gap between consumer goods and pro cameras has all but vanished the prosumer can, in effect, replace both the traditional pro filmmaker and the consumer. His mode of distribution is, therefore, the Internet where 60fps digital projectors are not required. Could the future be a 2D iTunes store selling the work of the story-centric hobbyists, while the pro-store houses the high-concept 3D spectacle churned out by Hollywood?
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On the release of Apple’s iPad, the world has realised that dedicated e-book readers are dead and that there are opportunities for independent book publishers. Designers are desperate to get their ebooks on the iBook store in the next 60 days before the iPad is released. Could an iTunes/iBook distribution stream develop to handle both 2D and 3D? The independent and the studio? |
Could the polarisation between “artistic merit” on the one hand and “entertainment and spectacle” on the other hand be defined by two separate distribution methods? Could it be that studios will create a 2D budget for safer character pieces as well as a 3D budget for riskier “fireworks display of a toy advert” investments. If so, could it be that studios no longer balk at the idea of funding adaptations of Henry James because they, ironically, become the “safe option”.
exciting times
Whatever happens it is clear that we are living through exciting times. With yesterday’s unveiling of the iPad and the iBook store, the print industry and Amazon’s Kindle are looking increasingly like the last polar bears on a shrinking ice-cap. Avatar too has forced everybody to think differently and everybody from writers to distributors to electronics giants like Sony are going to have to keep on their metaphorical toes if they want to match the accelerating pace of change.
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