James Cameron would like to be known not just as the creator of blockbusters like Titanic and Avatar, but as a visionary who helped transform cinematography on a par with the pioneers who introduced sound and color.
The ambitious, some say megalomaniac director may actually be on track to achieve that goal. With his latest film, Avatar, Cameron “has turned one man’s dream of the movies into a trippy joy ride about the end of life - our movie-going life included - as we know it,” wrote Manohla Dargis of the New York Times.
But the achievement won’t be Cameron’s alone. Avatar’s astonishing cinematography, which puts the audience there among the 10-foot tall, blue-skinned Na’Vi people, is the result of a decade-long collaboration between two geeks – Cameron, who began his career as a special effects guy (on Roger Corman’s low-budget, Battle Beyond the Stars), and Vince Pace, a cinematographer and inventor, who shared his dream of revolutionizing film.
James Cameron
The two men first worked together in the late 1980s, when Pace developed special underwater lighting for Cameron’s undersea sci-fi thriller, The Abyss.
They cemented their partnership about a decade ago, making a series of drawings on napkins as they brainstormed ways to design a camera system that would mimic the stereoscopic separation of human eyes to create more realistic three-dimensional images.
It was a long time in coming, but those scribblings became the basis for the development (and patenting) of their Fusion Camera System, which fused two Sony high-definition video cameras 2½ inches apart. Cameron first used it for Ghosts of the Abyss, an undersea 3D documentary released in 2003 that explored the wreck of the Titanic and then on another documentary, Aliens of the Deep in 2005. The camera was also used for Spy Kids 3D: Game Over (2003) and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D (2005).
Avatar, Cameron’s first feature film to use the cameras, takes it to a whole new level. Viewers still need to wear those special glasses. But the effects bear no resemblance to the gimmickry of 1950s 3D. Avatar closes the distance between the audience and the film. You are there.
Whether Avatar’s 3D heralds filmmaking of the future - and whether it might be the thing that pulls people from their flat-screen TVs back to movie theaters - remains to be seen. The critics have spoken. Now studio honchos are watching to see whether Avatar’s technological breakthroughs are matched by its box office receipts. So far, it is on track to do just that.
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