The product process

Pre-productionIn 1994, James Cameron came up with the idea of the film Avatar after completing his work on titanic, he announced to the world that he wanted it to be a fantasy sci-fi film with use of computer generated actors. He soon decided that the technology they had at the time did not suit the vision he had for the film Avatar an decided that for the next few years he would try and develop film technology until he was happy to start work on the film.

After a long wait of 8 years, Cameron was finally ready to begin work. In January 2006 he decided it was time to work on the script and also created the culture of the Na’vi; the alien race that would be in the world Pandora. James even went as far to create a language for the alien race and met up with Dr Paul Frommer a linguist at the university of south California.

Cameron made the decision that he wanted the footage to be filmed in a tropical location an he even had the idea of taking the actors to a rainforest so they could get a feel of what the setting would be in the film.

Then during July 2006 Cameron then announced that the film Avatar would have a mid 2008 release. The following August a visual effect studio Weta Digital said they would gladly sign on to help Cameron with the effects of the film, Cameron thought it would be a great idea because the studio was based in Wellington New Zealand which Cameron thought would be a great place for the filming as well, also he had a lot of faith in Weta digital studios because of there reputation of past films they have worked on such as Iron man, The Hobbit , The lord of the rings trilogy and some of the latest X-men films.

Pre-Production

Cameron finally got in touch with a handful of designers that he had worked many times with in the past, including famed fantasy illustrator Wayne Barlowe also concept artist Jodu Schell, he focused all of time working with these two deciding and perfecting what the Alien race would be shown like in the film, after weeks of changing and discussion with the two, he was finally happy with a final design that was made, it was soon sent of to Wellington New Zealand sothe visual effects could begin work on the Aliens race.

Cameron then started holding auditions for the major roles in L.A. Sam Worthington was chosen by Cameron who at the time, Sam was living in his car. This came as shock because of Avatar being such a massive budget film of $237 million many believed he would of chosen a well known experienced actor, Cameron said that Sam would give the character ‘a quality that is really real’

They finally began filming in New Zealand for location but no actual scenes were taken while filming in New Zealand, instead they went back to studios in L.A where they would start motion capturing work with Cameron's new technology, Cameron created his custom designed camera built into a 6-inch boom that allowed the facial Expressions of the actors to be captured and digitally recorded for the animators, this added perfect detail and was one of the major stories when Cameron was in production of the film.

Production

Finally after the preparation for the film Cameron decided to start work in L.A with the motion capturing suits, green screening and to try out his new designed camera for he real thing. The designed camera worked just as expected and took care of a lot of the hard work that they would have had to deal with later, they spent several weeks filming the same shots and scenes because of Cameron pushing everyone trying to get the best out of the crew and actors possible.

After everything was filmed in L.A, Cameron was ready to take the crew and camera to New Zealand where they filmed various shots around Wellington, he captured many shots of Wellingtons tropical area which they would use as the main base for what Pandora would look like. Soon after Cameron had finished all of his filming it was time to get the hard job done which was editing the whole movie.

Post productionFinally when all footage was sent to Wellington New Zealand, they began work on editing. Weta Digital was said to have more than 900 visual editors to create the location of Pandora. The use of Cameron's custom face expression camera saved a lot of time for the editors as well during a lot of the scenes. To render Avatar, Weta used a 10,000 sq ft (930 m2) Server farm making use of 4,000 Hewlett-Packard servers with 35,000 processor cores with 104 terabytes of RAM and three petabytes of network area storage, the computer that was used through out most of the editing has occupied the spot 197th for top 500 super computers in the world.

The main soundtrack for Avatar as well was composed by James Horner which would have been the third time Horner and Cameron collaborated after there work on creating the soundtrack for Alien and titanic. Horner recorded small parts of the chorus with the alien language Na’vi as well to create the effect of it being a sci-fi suiting with the films story and culture. They then chose British singer Leona Lewis to be the lead chorus singer in the song called ‘I see you’