A short while ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Jon Landau, the producer of Avatar at a Media Event in conjunction with the Bluray release. That initial release has proved to be the most successful launch in the history of the format, with 1.5 million units sold on its first day alone. That’s more than double the 600,000 unit haul of The Dark Knight and the best indication I can find that the format has finally found a home with home theater consumers everywhere.
The event was broken into 2 parts, with a brief presentation followed by roundtable discussions. In the presentation, Landau showed off some scenes from the upcoming release on a high-end projector. Though the projector was employing a setting for MotionFlow (a gimmicky feature whereby the display device attempts to create frames in between what it is given in order to smooth out motion. It’s great for sports, but tends to make movies look like they were shot with a DV camcorder) the results were still phenomenally lifelike. Part of the problem with 3D is that the glasses cut down on the amount of light getting to your eyes, and if the projector is not adjusted accordingly, it can yield a pretty dark image. Seeing the footage in 2D on a normal projection rig was jaw-droppingly beautiful, with more vibrant colors and textures than I remember from the theatrical release.
He spent much of the presentation setting up the individual clips. Mention was made of the fact that the first release is decidedly barebones. In fact, there isn’t a feature in sight, unless you count subtitles and a scene selector. There are no trailers, no commentaries, and no extra content on the disc at all. Why? So they could preserve the absolute best quality Bluray transfer of the film. They even looked into making the menus a little more elaborate and interesting, but were told that they’d have to scale back the quality of the transfer to make room.
One of the set stories involved Sam Worthington following his leap into the waterfall on Pandora, and how they ended up doing the motion capture of him swimming with him sitting in an office chair and getting pulled by Grips. Cutting edge meets Staples. The other story came from back in pre-production when the whole cast went out into the forest/jungles of Hawaii to get a sense of what the real environment would be like. They came upon some hikers in the woods and Worthington pointed back up the path to where Cameron was filming with a camcorder. He said, “See that guy over there? He directed Titanic.” The hiker took one look at him and responded, “Wow, he’s fallen a ways hasn’t he.”
Then we moved into the main event, the roundtable discussion. Our roundtable was a particularly packed event, so here are the main points that were discussed.
There will be an “Ultimate” release in November. It will have a feature length documentary alongside a slew of other special features including fully produced deleted scenes that Weta is currently animating as we speak. One reporter quipped that they should call it the “Pandora’s Box Edition” and Jon Landau continued to refer to it that way for the rest of the roundtable.
There will be a theatrical re-release in IMAX in August with an additional 6 minutes of new material. There isn’t enough physical space in IMAX projectors to extend the film any longer, so despite the rumored 20+ minutes of extra footage that could have been reincorporated back in, it’s unlikely we’d ever see those scenes in a theatrical setting.
They’re looking at possibly doing the 3D Bluray release next summer, but that’s subject to change and will have to do with the installed base of 3D TVs.
Landau echoed many of Jeffrey Katzenberg’s statements about the future of 3D glasses. He believes that there’s no reason that a person in the future won’t have reading glasses, sunglasses, and movie glasses, or items which serve multiple functionalities. Sunglasses which are also 3D glasses. I mean, they’re both already polarizing, right?
He strongly believes that 3D screens will become the de-facto way of dealing with future technology from cell phones to laptops.
He will never make another movie in 2D again.
Both he and Cameron were pushing for showing Avatar at higher than 24 frames per second speeds, 24 being the industry standard. Most of the criticism of 3D having a “jerky” effect is derived from the number of frames that are projected, and he sees no reason why digital projection systems couldn’t show future films at 48 or even 60 frames per second.
They have licensed out the Fusion Camera System, and it is currently being used on the production of Resident Evil: Afterlife. The cameras each shoot at 1080p, meaning that future models could easily yield even higher resolutions.
When asked about the 3D post-conversion process, he made it very clear that 3D should be a filmmaker decision. Creating movies with 2D in mind and getting forced to transform them later should never be the way 3D works, and even though Clash of the Titans was never mentioned directly, it was discussed that the less time you have and the less money you spend on the conversion process the worse it will look.
He isn’t against the process as a whole, as there are plans to convert Titanic for a re-release in the coming years. He does say that the director needs to be a part of the conversion process though, and when asked if he would support a film like Citizen Kane getting the post-processed treatment, responded that he wouldn’t be in favor of it unless someone resurrected Orson Wells. The decisions made are directorial ones, and they plan to spend at least 8 months converting Titanic.
When asked for advice on shooting 3D for aspiring filmmakers, he talked about maintaining the focus of your shot at the same depth as the screen itself. With 3D, the eye can choose where to focus on its own, and the only way for the 3D to work without feeling like a strain is to put the focus of your shot at the right distance where the eye doesn’t have to do work to see it. In more technical terms, Slaving Convergence to Focus is a must.
20th Century Fox is planting 1 million trees in conjunction with the Bluray release as part of their environmental push to go along with the film.
So there you have it. It was a very interesting discussion overall, and we managed to cover quite a bit in a short space of time. I’ll leave you with what I thought was easily the quote of the evening.
“Audiences have been experiencing stereo sound in movie theaters for decades. All we’re doing, is working to bring the visuals up to speed with the audio for the complete stereo movie experience.”
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