Is there anybody who watched movie Avatar twice or three times? It is not too much to say that the 3D period came today with Avatar. James Cameron, Director of this movie said it is fruit of his zany experiences through childhood and love for science in his whole life. Don’t you wonder how the masterpiece Avatar come into the world?
A Science Geek All Terminator series, The Abyss (1989), Titanic (1997), and Avatar (2009) are pieces of James Cameron. He said the latest work Avatar produced over about 5 years could be born through his works. This story comes from his childhood. In his school days, he was always absorbed in science fiction books on the school bus an hour each way every day. On almost all holidays he was out for hiking in the wood or pond, took frogs, snakes, and bug samples, and look at them all under the microscope. He said he was a real science geek, and especially he liked water ecosystems. He was hooked on photographs and movies of Jacques Cousteau, the French ocean explorer, so he decided to be a scuba diver at the age of 15. He pestered his father for moving to Buffalo, New York, which is almost only one region having a scuba class from a little village in Canada, 600 miles from the nearest ocean. Finally he could move, and has spent about 3,000 hours underwater. He learned deep ocean environments, and even the shallow oceans, are so rich with amazing life that really is beyond our imagination. He thinks he can't forget this grand nature seen during dives. His love affair with the ocean is ongoing, and it was reflected in his many movies represented by The Abyss, and Titanic. Avatar Comes to the World The Abyss put his love of underwater and in this movie, the first liquid water creature character which is made by computer generated animation, CG animation appeared. The global audience was charmed by this apparent magic. This was a whole new world of creativity for film artists. He said, “Wow, this is something that surely needs to be embraced into the cinematic art.” In Terminator 2, which was his next film, he created the magic again. In succession, a big ship sinks movie, Titanic, was made. For this, he took a real Russian submersible two and a half miles down in the North Atlantic looking through the eyes of a real sinking ship. This is the secret that this movie could have such realistic directing. After the success of Titanic, he thought, “Okay, I’m going to park my day job as a Hollywood movie maker, and I'm going to go be a fulltime explorer for a while.” He started planning these expeditions and in the course, he wound up going to the Bismarck Archipelago. He had a chance to ride robotic vehicles in the island, inspiring Avatar. In it, not a vehicle, but a living existence into which consciousness is injected comes to his mind, that is the Avatar. In Avatar, the realistic human emotive characters generated in CG were born through his experiences and imagination back to back. Don’t you want to explore his distinctive world of spirit more? Which other things in the above experience in the Bismarck Archipelago helped Avatar’s birth? Typing the word James Cameron in the search box on SNOW 2.0 will satisfy your curiosity.
