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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Jeff Goldsmith’s Creative Screenwriting Magazine Podcast is essential listening if you’re at all interested in films and what goes into writing them. For a recent episode, instead of his usual brilliant interview with a screenwriter, he posted the James Cameron & Peter Jackson Q&A from ComicCon 2009 (mp3 link) to commemorate the current releases of Avatar and The Lovely Bones.
As always, some interesting news came out of the show, in this case information that has become more relevant over time. Great comments like the directors’ thoughts on 3D, a detailed overview of Peter Jackson’s King Kong ride @ Universal Studios (apparently set to open Summer 2010, he says), and Peter Jackson elaborating about TinTin’s unique aesthetic (trying to get realistic hair, skin and cloth, while keeping Hérge’s original art and making everyone look believable sounds like a real challenge) are all great and fascinating, especially being chronologically closer to all of the above. But the information that stuck out most to me is the clip I’ve embedded in this post: some of James Cameron’s plans with the Avatar DVD.
From the clip/podcast:
One of the things that I wanna do for the DVD of Avatar is […] a video track that’s the reference cameras that show what the actors did, and cut it in parallel either with a scene or several scene or maybe the whole movie, I don’t know. So you can go all the way through the film, and you can see what the actors did and you can see what it looks like in the final scene. And you will see that it maps absolutely perfectly.
I would imagine that the Blu-Ray would use some of that video commentary track tech that I keep hearing about, but to have at least a few scenes on the DVD would be great as well.
You might remember that Robert Rodriguez did something similar for the Sin City DVD, which had a great special feature of the entire, pre-VFX film cut together and fast forwarded to end up with a runtime 14 minutes, but this would be a whole other deal, not to mention much harder to put together.
If Cameron manages to follow through on this plan, not only would I love it, but the collective minds of children everywhere will be blown and entire worlds of possibility will open up to them, just like when I was 9 or 10 and rented The Phantom Menace on DVD. It honestly changed everything I thought about film, and the immense detail contained in the Lord of the Rings DVDs certainly didn’t hurt, either.
What do you think? Do you want to see Avatar without effects? Do you even care? Or are you the type (I’m not judging) who doesn’t like special features at all because they take away the magic? I, if you can’t already tell, think they add to the wonder, and would love to see the alien world of Pandora replaced with a warehouse in Wellington as soon as I can. It fascinates me, because unlike the Home Tree, I might be able to actually go there.
He also mentions before the above clip that while facial capture was the main problen they had to attack for Avatar, motion capture in terms of body movement was “used extensively in Titanic”. I had no idea.
At TEDxVancouver a few months ago, our region’s best working filmmaker, Neill Blomkamp (now an Academy Award-nominated writer, ya heard?) was featured as a headlining speaker.
Now as if this fact wasn’t enough to get me excited (the newspaper I read about it in was unfortunately printed after the conferences registration deadline; of COURSE print is going to survive…), it was his topic and the way he presented it that left me pretty amazed.
The basic premise of his talk? The aliens in District 9 are nothing like how he believes real aliens are/would be. Fair enough, one would go on to expect 13 minutes about Weta and the impracticalities of non-humanoid creatures in a narrative film. This does not happen.
What he does, rather, is take advantage of the medium of a pre-recorded talk (he was out of town during TEDx) to edit together and narrate a captivating, theoretical science-driven vision of our universe, life on other planets, and the future of human civilization in a way that most of us probably haven’t ever thought of.
I know the man has his passions, but his level of research and knowledge on this topic is still surprising. I can’t help but feel that he might be using at least part of this as his next film, another sci-fi piece that he seems incredibly excited about in other interviews and spaces.
If it isn’t part of his next film, it’s still a fascinating quarter-hour to watch. If it is, however, we’re in for a mind-bending treat once his second film is unleashed in cinemas in the next couple of years.
