Avatar (Previewed by Sebastian Ng)

On the last day of the Pusan International Film Festival this October, Oscar-winning producer Jon Landau was at hand to present a 16-minute preview of Avatar and interact with film fest audiences.

Landau's Oscar was for his work on James Cameron's Titanic, by the way. Just so we're on the same page, Avatar is not only Cameron's first film in 12 years, it is also the supposed harbinger of modern stereoscopic filmmaking, ushering in nothing less than the Third Revolution in Cinema (capitals mine) – the first two being sound and color.

"But 3D movies have been around what," you say. Yes, but – without getting into technicalities – Journey To The Center Of The Earth 3D and Ice Age 3 don't exactly count.

You see, earlier this decade, well before Hollywood started jumping into the prospective bandwagon of 3D movies, Cameron – who was then busy not making movies and indulging in his obsession with underwater exploration and submarines – had already started thinking about advancing 3D technology.

As has been widely reported, the idea for Avatar was conceived over 14 years ago. But it was only after Cameron tested out 3D filmmaking on his 2003 documentary Ghosts Of The Abyss that he felt sufficiently confident that the maturation of the technology required to bring out the vision in his mind was within grasp.

As Landau explained, production on Avatar started in May 2005. So that's one year of R&D, 6 months to create the production pipeline for work to flow through, 3 months training the cast to work with the new production techniques, 4 months of motion capture, 3 months of live action photography, and finally post-production, which has lasted till now.

Landau admitted that when they first started, the production team felt like what NASA space engineers must have felt in the early 1960s. There was simply no precedence for the kind of film experience they were attempting to create. "For the first year working on the movie, we didn't even tell anyone what we were working on. What's really exciting now, is being able to share the movie with everyone after four and a half years."

To illustrate why the film took so long, Landau explained that many of the sequences (in fact, all the ones set on the alien planet, Pandora) were entirely CGI. Take the scenes in the Pandoran forest: a single frame can take up to 4 days just to render. (Avatar will have close to 225,000 frames in total.)

When asked whether he considers Avatar a revolutionary film, however, Landau played down such sentiments. "No single movie can revolutionize the film industry, but it can be a step towards that revolution." For example, new CGI techniques developed in The Abyss made Terminator 2 possible; the digital characters in Titanic were the precursor to the digital armies in movies such as Lord Of The Rings. "We see ourselves as door openers," Landau contended.

"3D is here to stay. Think about it, we live our lives in 3D. Handphones, monitor screens … ultimately all these devices will be in 3D." When asked whether the 3D effect would be distracting or even dizzying, Landau claimed: "I get sucked into the narrative more in 3D. Whether it's an action movie or drama, I think it will play better in 3D. At the same time, I also think 2D still has a lot to offer."

As for the strange creatures in the alien world, what the design team did was to take the ecology of our natural world and play around with it. For example, transferring the bioluminescent environment of the deep sea onto land. "It was important that, at the end of the day, the world looks both alien and familiar," Landau said.

Director James Cameron Cast Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Sigourney Weaver Runtime 161 mins Opens 17 December

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Sebastian Ng studied filmmaking at the Los Angeles Film School in Hollywood, majoring in Directing and Sound Design but spent most of his time watching movies, and attending film festivals and meet-the-filmmaker sessions. Having returned to Malaysia in 2008, he currently works as a digital production coordinator for Rhythm & Hues Studios (Malaysia). He continues to fuel his passion for film by writing reviews and other ramblings for his blog, Cinematic Concerns.

Check out Sebastian's coverage of the PIFF2009 in KLue's December issue!