Pic: MSN |
As a fan of CGI or Computer Graphic Illustration (you’d never guess from the Wallpapers we’re offering!), I was waiting for James Cameron’s Avatar to be released with great anticipation. I’ll admit I was a trifle worried about the production taking place in 3D. What with a cinema full of Keanu Reaves/Neo lookalikes trying to immerse ourselves in a film, I anticipated some serious distraction. So why am I posting here on our Celtic Mythology site? Well, read on, dear reader, read on… |
Avatar is a 2009 American science fiction epic film written and directed by James Cameron and starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Michelle Rodriguez and Stephen Lang. The film is set in the year 2154 on Pandora, a moon in the Alpha Centauri star system. Humans are engaged in mining Pandora’s reserves of a precious mineral, while the Na’vi—a race of indigenous humanoids—resist the colonists’ expansion, which threatens the continued existence of the Na’vi and the Pandoran ecosystem. The film’s title refers to the genetically engineered bodies used by the film’s characters to interact with the Na’vi.
The use of the 3D technology was a vast step-forward in entertainment provision. It was nothing like the 3D images that I had seen before using the glases with the red lens and the green lens, it was believable. Ruthie laughed at me at one point when I flinched to dodge a tin can that seemed to be flying towards me! Neither were the 3-Dimensional effects so obviously introduced to show off the technology, that the story became secondary to the effects. So, if the film was startling in its use of technology and the visualisations of the planet Pandora and its natives were astoundligly beautiful, so what about the story?
The Story of Avatar
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The beginnings of the story, without giving anything of the plot away and spoiling the story for those of you who haven’t as yet seen this wonderful film, are as folows.
In 2154, the RDA corporation is mining Pandora, a lush, Earth-like, moon of the planet Polyphemus, in the Alpha Centauri star system. Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) heads the mining operation, employing marines for security. The corporation intends to exploit Pandora’s reserves of a valuable mineral called unobtanium.
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Pic: NY Daily News |
Pandora is inhabited by the Na’vi, a blue-skinned species of sapient humanoids with feline characteristics.] Physically much stronger and taller than humans, the Na’vi live in harmony with Nature, worshiping a mother goddess called Eywa.
Humans cannot survive exposure to Pandora’s atmosphere for very long and must use gas masks. Attempting to improve relations with the natives and learn about Pandora’s biology, scientists grow Na’vi bodies modified with human DNA, called avatars, that are controlled by genetically-matched, mentally-linked human operators. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic former marine, replaces his murdered identical twin brother, a scientist trained to be an avatar operator. Doctor Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), the head of the Avatar Program, considers Sully an inadequate replacement for his brother and relegates him to a bodyguard role. [Wiki]
The Mythology of Avatar
The real reason the film hit me so hard was all the work we have done on the stories of Irish Mythology over the last two years! The tale of the Na’vi is almost identrical to that of the Tuatha De Danaan. The tall, beautiful figures who are obviously not human (to the Celts, they were Fey) who are invaded by humans, the Sons of the Gael, the Sons of Mil, and forced to retreat into the Hollow Hills was shouting at me from every interaction between Jake, the human, and the natives. We have heard similar stories before with the horrible fate of the Native American Indian.
Of particular interest, was the relationship of the Na’vi to their planet. Not only could they… Rats, I can’t give too much away here! Suffice it to say that as a Mother Goddess, read Eywa as the Mother Goddess of the Celts and the story and relationship is the same! And let’s not forget the ecological threat that the film offers!
Totally amazing! The film has been slated as not having a story as gripping as many of the classic SF movies over the last 10 years, but I think we are looking at the film in the wrong light. What we are seeing is a living, modern, technologically superior version of our old, ancestral mythology. Stories that are true to the heart survive for millenia not decades.
Sequels
Pic: Digital Production |
I’ve also heard that James Cameron is planning one, possibly two sequels and I’m overjoyed. I can’t imagine where he is going to take the story and I hope desperately he doesn’t lose the incredibly strong, mythological message that he has already made but such is the fate of modern cinema. At least, the story arc has already been plotted and has not been written in response to market success – which tends to make me think the story is more important than the money. |
I’ve had a storyline in mind from the start – there are even scenes in Avatar that I kept in because they lead to the sequel.
Cameron said. Lead actor Sam Worthington, who stars as the paraplegic Marine Jake Sully who falls in love with a Na’vi warrior princess, has already signed on to the sequel. Cameron says
Let me put it this way. All of those naysayers, the nattering nabobs of negativity, the people who were saying that the movie looked bad before they had even seen anything – you have to learn to ignore them. That’s something that I learned on Titanic. But yeah, it’s satisfying that I was able to prove them all wrong.
All I can say is that humans, including myself with the stories that I tell and write, are no where near as important as they stories that we tell. We will pass away and fade, but the true tales live on in the hearts of our clans. Let’s pray that the beauty and truth of Avatar continues into the sequels and pressure to conform does not bow Mr. Cameron’s head!
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/movies/2010/01/14/2010-01-14_james_cameron_already_planning_avatar_sequel_i_was_able_to_prove_them_all_wrong.html#ixzz0cdGMpgvI
These thoughts are just my opinion, guys 
Late Additions: Notes on the CG Technology Used
I’ve just found out some details about the rendering technology used to create the Avatars and the beautiful jungle of Pandora. Check this out:
Weta Digital are Cameron’s angels. Of the 162 minutes of film, 117 minutes equaling 1,832 shots was created by Weta’s angels, over 2,000 if you count the omits. Weta worked on every scene with a Na’vi.
Most of the trees are built by hand, and in a brilliant move, they used Massive for the ground cover. The head of the Massive Department, Jon Allitt, pointed out that if they use Massive to tell characters how to react in a crowd, giving a plant a bit of a brain and basing it’s growth on the surrounding terrain could direct how a plant would grow.
Allitt wrote a system that allowed Weta’s artists to plant (programming) seeds in Massive that accomplished this, as explained by VFX Supervisor Eric Saindon.
It was very interesting. You could actually watch a forest grow in real time with this solution, and any TD could grow just by painting colors on the terrain.With this elegant solution, the big trees would grow first, then the smaller trees would die off as the big trees took away the light, the smaller trees would fight for position, the ground cover would fill in where it could get light.
This offered the ability to have variants built in easily by simply changing the random number seed, a programming term that means when you do a random call, there is a number you can pass through to offset the results.
A lot of our modeling techniques were procedural, so we wrote a tree building L-System type that allowed us to build lots of variations on trees, plants, and ground covers in a very efficient way. They came out essentially rigged so we could do dynamics and interactions.
The result was roughly 2000 variants on plants and trees for dressing the jungles on Pandora.
Weta wrote a couple of plant building tools, not just L-systems but plant growth rules to guide stages of growth. VFX Supervisor Guy Williams elaborated.
We also had a vine growing tool where we could specify attributes like drooping, spiral around a trunk, how much they stick to the surface.
The foliage had to be this detailed to stand up. Williams said:
We put a lot of effort into the Avatars. We made sure that every piece of clothing and the Avatars themselves had just as much reality as a live action shoot so we could put them in the place of characters and not have them look simplified. The problem we ran into was when we put these gorgeous looking Avatars into our CG jungle, the jungle looked simple, so we had to start adding polygons and texture maps to the jungle.
Promoting the plants up to the Avatar level
usually meant getting better edge detail or curvature of the leaves, or as simple as adding the smaller structures that come off the plant.
They took that concept a step further, by spreading trees and fallen tree trunks throughout the jungle, textured with moss and bark.
Read more geeky, tech-stuff details about the amazing work that Weta did on the CG Society website.
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