Whether you were a fan of the film or not, it's hard to deny that James Cameron's AVATAR brought quite a lot of technological breakthroughs to the worlds of CGI and 3D. With four sequels to AVATAR on the way, Cameron is hoping that they will push those same innovations even further. While accepting an honorary membership in the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, James Cameron promised to push innovation in service of storytelling for the AVATAR sequels.
I'm going to push. Not only for better tools, workflow, high dynamic range and high frame rates — the things we are working toward. I’m still very bullish on 3D, but we need brighter projection, and ultimately I think it can happen — with no glasses. We’ll get there.
3D has never really grown on me, although with so many lackluster 3D conversions out there, I'm likely not alone in that regard. On the rare occasions I've found myself engaged with a movie's 3D presentation, having to wear the 3D glasses over the glasses I wear to see the screen isn't the best experience. If anyone is going to successfully lead the charge for a glasses-free 3D, it'll be James Cameron. With the HFR presentation of Ang Lee's recent BILLY LYNN'S LONG HALFTIME WALK coming under fire, Cameron said that just like any other film-making tool, it will take time to find the right use for it.
In terms of that kind of hyper clarity, there may be some films that benefit from it, but I feel you still have to have a little bit of that veil of unreality that comes with [today’s commonly used] 24 frames per second. This is my conclusion now. I don’t think you do it wall-to-wall, I think you do it where you need it.
In addition to HFR, the team behind Cameron's AVATAR sequels are also working on "HDR, 4K for native stereo reduction, all the plethora of things we can do with CG that we couldn’t do or were so difficult. I’m going to need a lot of water [simulations], dynamics sims. And merging water, air, fire, all that sort of stuff together into complex simulations is going to be essential for the Avatar films." Cameron also added that "movies are going to look better than they’ve ever looked. They already do and they are going to continue [to look better]. Anything we can imagine, we can put on the screen." By the time AVATAR 2 hits theaters in 2018 (unless it gets pushed back again) it will have been nearly a decade since the first AVATAR film introduced us to the world of Pandora. We all know how much technology can advance in that time-span, so I must admit that I'm quite excited to see what differences will be apparent between the two films. Hopefully the story will have also advanced. Zing! Not really. Happy Halloween!