Think back to the year 1999. There was no war on terror, hope for Al Gore becoming president still existed, and the mp3 revolution was just dawning through Napster (on dial up internet speeds!). It was this year that James Cameron announced that he was to begin working on his next project after Titanic, called Avatar.

A year went by, an election was stolen, countless countdowns were rebroadcasted to death, and all that was released about Avatar was the simple plot synopsis :“In the future, Jake, a paraplegic war veteran, is brought to another planet, Pandora, which is inhabited by the Na’vi, a humanoid race with their own language and culture. Those from Earth find themselves at odds with each other and the local culture.”

Cameron decided to wait until the technology to bring his vision to total fruition existed; I am pretty sure that if he attempted to create the movie using what was available back then, it would have ended up looking like this:

It wasn’t until 2002 when Cameron saw Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, that he felt that the technology was ready to bring his vision to life. Cameron contacted Vincent Pace who he worked with in The Abyss, Titanic, and Aliens of the Deep to develop a new system of recording stereoscopic images (3D for us normal folk), which lead to the development of a system called Fusion 3D which uses a lens that closely resembles the human eye to record information. This technology combined with state of the art Motion Capture technology and a magical array of cameras that allowed James Cameron to manipulate the camera movements live while shooting a scene (when this information gets released in detail in American Cinematographer Magazine I will be sure to break it down for you); which is being hailed as the next big thing since technicolor.

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