Avatar will make people truly experience something, one more layer of the suspension of disbelief will be removed. All the syn-thespians are photo-realistic. Now that we’ve discovered CG characters in 3D look more real than 2D. Your brain is cued – it’s a real thing not a picture – and discounting the part of (the) image that makes it look fake,” says James Cameron at the Microsoft Advance ’08 conference.

A year after Cameron made the statement, “Avatar” is now ready to reel in Phil. theaters come December 17 (Thursday). The day is set for all fans, film critics and filmmakers to finally assess the technology Cameron has so passionately talked about the past few years.

“Avatar” leads us to the alien world called Pandora through the eyes of a paraplegic marine warrior Jake Sully (Sam Worthington). Jake is recruited to travel light years to the human outpost on Pandora, where corporations are mining a rare mineral that is key to solving Earth’s energy crisis. Since the atmosphere in Pandora is toxic, the government devised the Avatar Program, in which human “drivers” have their consciousness linked to an avatar, a remotely-controlled biological body that can survive in the lethal air. These avatars are genetically engineered hybrids of human DNA mixed with DNA from the natives of Pandora…the Na’vi.
James Cameron’s well-deserved reputation for developing ways to create new images on the screen goes back in 1984 when he created the unforgettable stunning visuals in “The Terminator,” the terrifyingly real, nightmarish predators in “Aliens” (1986) and that of the cutthroat undersea sci-fi thriller, “The Abyss” (1989).

For his latest undertaking, making “syn-thespians” believable to the eye is the last great hurdle for computer effects artists working on “Avatar.”

The movie is by far the single most complex piece of filmmaking ever made with 1,600 shots for a 2.5 hour movie.

Cameron is using the very latest digital 3D technology for Avatar and that along with the very latest performance capture effects, have led many to speculate that the film will represent a major breakthrough for cinema that will change the way films are made.

Performance capture is where an actor’s movements and expressions are electronically tracked and translated into computer generated imagery to bring the character to life. Basically, the main characters wear black leotards and would act out their roles as Avatars and the camera would super-impose the computer-generated creatures on to the images while shooting.

With the actors work tirelessly to incorporate all these physical, linguistic, and emotional nuances that were central to their characters and to Cameron’s vision, the filmmaker was determined to capture it all in the actors’ computer generated incarnations.

“Avatar” is a 20th Century Fox film opening on December 17 (Thursday) to be distributed by Warner Bros. in the Philippines.