James Cameron’s new movie Avatar comes out on December 18th and from the looks of everything we’ve read and heard about it, the movie could represent an inflection point in the film business. The timing of the release of Avatar coincides with a number of important technological advances that could usher in a 3D wave that will forever change the way we experience and view content – not only at the movie theater, but in our homes and on the road with our mobile devices.
Cameron has wanted to make Avatar for a long time, but he could not do it the way he envisioned until he could overcome several technological hurdles. The first hurdle was that Cameron’s Avatar required digital theatres. Standards for digital cinema didn’t exist until recently with the creation of the Digital Cinema Initiative in 2002. Once standards had been created – and that process took several years – digital technology had to be installed in movie theatres. We are in the early stages of the transition from traditional film to digital technology, as Kris and I observed in a recently published Research 2.0 report, “The Rise of 3D Cinema” (registration required). There are some 6,000 digital cinemas around the world today and another 50,000-plus in the pipeline over the next 5 years.
Digital cinemas were required for Avatar. But Cameron also required another upgrade – 3D digital cinema technology. The award-winning director wanted Avatar to be an immersive experience and the only way to generate that kind of experience is in 3D. Avatar will be shown at 2,500 digital cinemas equipped for 3D and roughly 3,500 screens.
To date, roughly 40% of all digital theatres have been upgraded to show motion pictures in 3D. Cameron realized when he was filming Avatar that theaters were still in the early stages of the 3D cinema build-out so it is not surprising that the movie will be shown in conventional 2D as well. After all, when you spend $250 million making a movie, as Fox did with Cameron on Avatar, and you plan to sink another $100 million into promoting the movie, you want it to be shown on as many screens as possible.
Another key enabler for Avatar was a digital, maneuverable, high-resolution 3D camera. No such camera was available to make Avatar a reality, so Cameron did what many entrepreneurs have done in the past – he invented one, in conjunction with Sony. The new 3D camera gave Cameron the tool he needed to deliver an immersive viewing experience.
There were other innovations Cameron needed to bring Avatar to life. He needed a way to create fully photo-realistic animated characters, akin to what Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson did with the character Gollum. Cameron wanted to create a virtual world – called Pandora in the film – that would be indistinguishable from reality. The director produced a prototype of the technology and got Fox to invest the money to back it.
Cameron used some advanced software known as simulcam to combine live-action footage and computer generated graphics to produce composites on monitors in real-time. The software compresses into seconds a job that would typically take weeks. The simulcam is part of what Cameron called the “brain bar,” which is a huge networked database. Cameron also had animators work from head-rig videos which supply a complete visual record that they can map to each character’s face.
To produce Avatar, Cameron also invented new rules of shooting 3D. He developed a system with twin lenses that could mimic human vision. He threw out the conventional wisdom about stereography and took a different approach – one that he believes will create an all-encompassing cinematic experience. Cameron’s overall goal with Avatar was total immersion.
Cameron’s longtime producer Jon Landau says that Avatar is not just a movie. It’s a world. He notes that Star Wars was the last original universe created by the motion picture industry. Cameron has long desired to produce a film like Star Wars. With the advanced 3D technology at his disposal, he’s has the ability to go beyond what George Lucas did. He can create an immersive experience that far exceeds Star Wars. If Cameron achieves his goal, and that remains to be seen, Hollywood and the motion picture industry will never be the same.
Avatar represents an inflection point for the film industry. Welcome to the age of the Immersive Cinema.


