James Cameron’s New 3-D Epic Could Change Film Forever

James Cameron’s “Avatar” opens in theaters December 18th, and media outlets worldwide are abuzz with interviews, stories, and the technology behind the film.  Over at Wired they have a great background piece about what happened to James Cameron from the debut of the original Star Wars to the present, including the maddening attention to detail we will get to witness in Avatar.

Cameron is trying to show me something with a laser pointer. He queues up a scene toward the end ofAvatar and freezes the frame on an image of a large crowd of Na’vi. He uses the pointer to draw attention to an ornate headdress composed of hundreds of tiny beads. The onscreen image is amazingly crisp, and the headdress appears utterly real. Each bead was designed by a digital artist, Cameron says, so it would look handmade. “Every leaf, every blade of grass in this world was created,” he says, and his laser pointer streaks across the screen, alighting on so many things I can’t follow its path.

James Cameron’s New 3-D Epic Could Change Film Forever | Magazine.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .