Editing on ‘Avatar’ is Done, Only VFX Remain
James Cameron on the set of 'Avatar'
In an interview with the Inquirer, James Cameron has confirmed all the editing work on Avatar is now complete. The work that remains now rests in the hands of Peter Jackson’s visual effects company, Weta Digital.
He has also confirmed that the studio has seen the cut and are happy with it, and that if the film makes money he’s good to go with the sequel.
Speaking with Inquirer.net, Cameron said:
In the most important respects as a director, I’m 100 percent done because the film is shot and edited. My job for the next few months until we deliver at the end of November is more as a visual effects person, working to make sure that the shots look real, that they’re all up to an even standard.
In terms of a film’s cut, the studio has seen it. They were pretty happy with it. You saw finished material so there are whole sections of the film that are actually done. It’s just a question of getting in some of the remaining scenes from what we call template level where it looks like a video game up to the level of photo-realism. All the template stuff was turned over to Weta like a year ago or in some cases, six months ago for the shots that will come in last. The process is quite labor intensive. I’m working 14, 16 hours a day but all the major creative decisions have been made.
Cameron also explained why Avatar is not the same as The Matrix:
Pandora is a very Earth-like world in the sense that it has trees, foliage, wildlife but you can’t breathe the air as a human being. So the human presence on Pandora is confined to what is called the base which is actually a mining colony. If you want to go out and interact with the indigenous people of Pandora, either you have to use breathing equipment or you have to use these Avatar bodies. These bodies are a way of remote projecting your consciousness into a biological body. So the thing to keep in mind is that it’s not like ‘The Matrix’ or any other virtual reality film where a character goes into a virtual body, into a virtual world. This is a real, tangible physical world and you’re inhabiting a biological body.
He also enlightens us to the fact that the alien Na’vi language is a real language created for the film and that a non-verbal vocabulary was also created for their ear and tail movement.
We created the language of the Na’vi starting about the time that I was doing the shooting draft of the script so that would have been in the first quarter of 2006. Dr. Paul Frommer, who was with USC (University of Southern California) at the time, spent about a year creating the language. The trick was we had the language before we actually cast most of the parts. So the casting director, Margery Simkin, had to learn a bit of Na’vi so that she could get the auditioning actors to repeat the sounds of the language. If they couldn’t make the sounds, they couldn’t have the part.
The studio asked me the same question. They asked, “Do they have to have tails?” We’re very happy with the way the Na’vi worked out because what we found is the tail and the ears show the characters’ emotional state. A cat owner knows that you can tell a cat’s mood by what its tail is doing. Just as we created a verbal language, we created a vocabulary for the tail and the ears.
And finally, on a sequel:
If we make money, we’ll make another one.
Full interview at: Inquirer.net
September 3rd, 2009 at 11:58 am
From the trailer, it looks like it was all “template” stuff.