Avatar

[Pozer]

http://www.joblo.com/new-avatar-poster

[picolas]

haha

[MacGuffin]

'Avatar' trailer tickets to be given online
16-minute sneak peek to play in Imax theaters Aug. 21
Source: Hollywood Reporter
   
Free tickets will be distributed online starting Monday for special Imax presentations of a 16-minute trailer for Fox's upcoming 3D sci-fi actioner "Avatar."

The extended trailer, featuring an on-camera intro by director James Cameron, hits 101 Imax venues in the U.S. and Canada on Aug. 21 in a promo push announced at the recent Comic-Con International confab in San Diego. On the same date, theaters worldwide will begin showing more conventional 2D and 3D "Avatar" trailers.

Fans will be provided theater information and other "Avatar" tidbits via AvatarMovie.com. Visitors to the site also will see ticketing instructions and links to individual movie theaters.

"It will be two tickets to a customer to keep people from hoarding," Fox distribution boss Bruce Snyder said Wednesday. "We expect a tremendous amount of interest from the fans who are aware of 'Avatar.' "

The extended "Avatar" trailer will play just before and after separately ticketed performances for Warner Bros.' "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince." At most of the specialty venues, the trailer will be shown between 6-7 p.m., running twice within the hour span.

"I think it's going to be a bit of a stampede," Imax Filmed Entertainment chief Greg Foster said. "But I can't wait for everyone to see the footage."

The extended trailer will contain much of the "Avatar" footage shown at screenings this summer at exhibitor events in Hollywood and Amsterdam, and also at Comic-Con. But at least one unspecified new scene will be included.

Part of the footage shows Sam Worthington's Avatar character adapting to a strange new environment in the fantastical world of Pandora, and a battle scene figures in a closing montage. There also is an extended clip involving a forest attack by wolf-like creatures.

The other "Avatar" trailer will continue to play in coming weeks before feature presentations of Fox Searchlight's comedy "Post Grad," the Weinstein Co.'s Brad Pitt starrer "Inglourious Basterds" and other late summer and fall releases.

"Avatar," Cameron's first dramatic feature since 1997's "Titanic," unspools worldwide Dec. 18.

[MacGuffin]

New Photo from 'Avatar' Finally Shows Us Something!

Finally! A new photo from James Cameron's Avatar has been released online via Fox International and it's a pretty cool one featuring the film's star Sam Worthington sitting in front of his Avatar. Worthington plays a paraplegic war veteran who's asked to travel to the distant planet of Pandora on a mining operation. But because the planet is too harsh for humans, they've developed a cloning program that mixes human DNA with that of the planet's resident creatures, the Na'vi -- thus allowing our paraplegic to walk again inside the body of his Avatar, which also houses his consciousness. It's all rather freaky, but very cool nonetheless.

Avatar hits theaters on December 18, though on August 21 you can check out a 16-minute trailer at selected IMAX theaters in the US and Canada. If you miss the IMAX trailer, though, you'll be able to catch the film's regular trailer, which is also set to debut the same day.


streeeetchy image link

[MacGuffin]

James Cameron on 'Avatar': Like 'Matrix,' 'This movie is a doorway'
Source: Geoff Boucher; Los Angeles Times
EXCLUSIVE: PART 1 of the HERO COMPLEX interview

"Go ahead, fire away, I'm your guy." That's the first thing James Cameron said to me, and I had to smile – I certainly had plenty to ask him about. I had just sat down and watched about 35 minutes of footage from "Avatar" and, to put it bluntly, I was dazzled. I saw more footage than fans at Comic-Con International (I saw, for instance, a tense scene toward the end of the film as Sam Worthington's character, Jake Sully, is made a prisoner on the alien world of Pandora) and even found out how the film ends (don't worry, no spoilers here). But let's get to it -- this is Part 1 of the Hero Complex interview with Oscar-winner Cameron, the 54-year-old Canadian filmmaker whose 20th Century Fox sci-fi epic "Avatar" reaches theaters on Dec. 18.

GB: Jim, congratulations on the film, it's very, very compelling. I'm excited to see it in its entirety and even more excited to talk to you about it.

JC: Well, thanks; I'm really glad you liked it. And that's what we were hoping for. We've been working like crazy on this for a long time. And what we want is for people to like it, so that's nice to hear.

GB: I have to say it was refreshing to see a big, special effects film that was not based on a bestselling novel, a comic book, toy, old television show. That's rare these days, and it's a treat to go in, sit down and have no idea where the plot and the characters were going to go.

JC: It's simultaneously one of the great strengths and one of the potential weaknesses. We have no brand value. We have to create that brand value. "Avatar" means something to that group of fans that know this film is coming, but to the other 99% of the public it's a nonsense word and we have to hope we can educate them. Well, I shouldn't say a nonsense word – it doesn't mean anything specific in terms of a brand association. And in fact there may be even a slight negative one because more people know about the Saturday morning cartoon, the anime, than about this particular film. We've got to create that [brand] from scratch. On the other hand, ultimately, it is probably the film's greatest strength in the long run. We've had these big, money-making franchise films for a long time, "Star Trek" and "Star Wars," you know, "Harry Potter," and there's a certain sort of comfort factor in that; you know what you're going to get. But there's no kind of shock of the new that's possible with that. It's been a while since something that took us on a journey, something that grabbed us by the lapels and dragged us out the door and took us on a journey of surprise.

GB: "The Matrix" immediately springs to mind...

JC: Yes, yes, that's a very, very good example. That's something where we had no real way of knowing what that film was going to be about and it really just took us on a great ride.

GB: And like "The Matrix," this movie presents this immersive experience. The alien world and the technology you're using to tell the story, it's a big movie.

JC: The story is told very much from character. You go on Jake's journey with him. It actually starts quite small. It starts close to him, in his apartment with him, and it just expands and expands in scope as it goes along.

GB: I smiled at the "You're not in Kansas anymore" line when the main character reaches the alien world. There really is this "Wizard of Oz" sense of transportation when the story reaches the planet of Pandora.

JC: Yeah. It's my favorite movie; I had to get it in there somewhere. The production designer was Rick Carter, who actually played that out. He thought how it was, in some ways, like Dorothy's journey. I didn't quite get as much of that [when I first wrote it]. You do things sometimes as a writer subconsciously, things you're not even aware of. I'm always comfortable doing things instinctively because I see it as taping into this vein of archetype that works for a broader audience base. I don't question what I'm doing if it feels right. There might be some other references there I might not be aware of.

GB: You wrote the first script for this film almost 15 years ago. While you were waiting for technology to reach the point where it could be made, I'm curious how much of that very earliest story remained intact.

JC: I had to rework to make it possible. My treatment was so expansive and novelistic that it needed to be necked down just to make it something that could be done on the screen. This film is done on an epic scale, but it's done within the parameters of a Hollywood movie. What I found is that instead a script I had written the outline of a novel, and it was just too much story, too much back story, too many secondary characters ... but look, sometimes lightning just strikes; you have write everything down, get it done. Better to weed it out later and not miss an idea. It was essentially the longest script, in terms of the amount of time it took me to get a workable draft. The first time I tried, it ended up being more than 200 pages, so I had to go back and throw out big chunks, a lot of ideas went out. But I have to say the essence of all the big ideas stayed and I felt pretty good about that.

GB: The heritage of the project and the mystery of it, since it's not an adaptation, have created this fairly intense interest among the fanboy sector. That was obvious with the interest leading up to Comic-Con International. Do you feel you have to win fans over now to create the sort of success you want for this movie? 

JC: I think there are no real negatives because we aren't going to get prejudged like "Watchmen" or even a Batman or Spider-Man movie because you don't have all that history and that huge, brand-based mythology that you have to live up to. We aren't going to piss anybody off because they don't know what this thing is. Nobody read the novel, nobody read the graphic novel, we're not going to be playing against expectation. They aren't going to be viewing us as a disappointment or letdown before the movie even starts. This is a doorway and they don't know what's on the other side. We're going to open it for them.

There are a lot of fans of this kind of science fiction and fantasy film, and I think it's pretty fertile soil for us. I don't want to sound like, you know, 'Pride goeth before the fall," or too much hubris, but I think we get those fans to support this. I think our greater challenge is the wider public, which isn't as predisposed to embrace the movie like those fantasy and sci-fi fans. We need to talk to that audience and make them believe that this is a must-see even if they aren't sci-fi fans. And I'm not putting down Comic-Con fans. When I go down there I'm among my peeps. It's a great place to unveil "Avatar."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

James Cameron: Yes, 'Avatar' is 'Dances with Wolves' in space. . .sorta
Source: Geoff Boucher; Los Angeles Times
EXCLUSIVE: PART 2 of the HERO COMPLEX INTERVIEW

This is the second part of my interview with Oscar-winning director James Cameron, who is (finally) bringing the world his years-in-the-making sci-fi epic "Avatar." Today he explains why the film might be rightly considered "Dances with Wolves" in space and he shares his opinion of recent special-effects blockbusters -- he thought "Star Trek" absolutely rocked but "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," well, uh, not so much. He also teaches me a new word.

GB: With this movie, it feels like a classic going-native film, if that doesn't sound too flippant. In the half-hour of footage I saw I was reminded at certain points of "Farewell to the King," "A Man Called Horse" and "At Play in the Fields of the Lord."

JC: Yeah, yeah, "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" was among the videos that I used as a reference. Yeah, absolutely. Tom Berenger did some real interesting stuff in that film.

GB: There's also maybe some heritage linking it to "Dances With Wolves," considering your story here of a battered military man who finds something pure in an endangered tribal culture.

JC: Yes, exactly, it is very much like that. You see the same theme in "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" and also "The Emerald Forest," which maybe thematically isn't that connected but it did have that clash of civilizations or of cultures. That was another reference point for me. There was some beautiful stuff in that film. I just gathered all this stuff in and then you look at it through the lens of science fiction and it comes out looking very different but is still recognizable in a universal story way. It's almost comfortable for the audience – "I know what kind of tale this is." They're not just sitting there scratching their heads, they're enjoying it and being taken along. And we still have turns and surprises in it, too, things you don't see coming. But the idea that you feel like you are in a classic story, a story that could have been shaped by Rudyard Kipling or Edgar Rice Burroughs.

GB: Or Joseph Conrad...?

JC: Yes, exactly. And I think returning to classic tales is a powerful thing. Look, right now is a special time because we can basically do anything we imagine. I mean you have to work hard at it, and you've got to have the technique and you have to be willing to throw money at the problem. Sometimes you have to be a little bold and go out on a limb. But if you can imagine it, you can do it. That's why we're seeing this renaissance of  visual imagination. It's just a growth. Films look better now than they've ever looked. Sometimes they get a little lost in it though. I'll go to a "Transformers" film for the fun of seeing the spectacle but, personally, my soul craves a little more story, a little more meat on the bone and characters and that sort of thing. Look, I think it's about finding a balance between story and all of this gimmickry. I think I veer toward classicism, being solidly rooted in the classic stuff. I mean really old-school science fiction. This is a movie I would have loved to have seen when I was a 14-year-old kid in 1968.

GB: Well, certainly, that's why it's reassuring for anyone to see movies like "Star Trek" and "Up," which might be my two favorite films this year, because both are examples of technology and craft achieving the fantastic but in service of great storytelling.

JC: Right, "Star Trek" -- look at that. That is a great example of a complete reinvention. Really, it's beautifully done, really. Bravo. And I loved the first season of "Star Trek" back in 1965 or 1966 or whenever it was, it grabbed me as a kid, but I drifted away from it over time. And this was such a great way to see it come back as re-imagined. What fun.

GB: In the footage I saw it seemed to me that you were able to present nuanced emotion in the faces of the alien tribe and the human avatars who walk among them. That's vital, isn't it? I mean we've seen movies where computer-created or computer-augmented  visages seemed wooden or dead-faced.

JC: That was the biggest challenge of the film. No matter how much art and technology we threw at this thing, if it wasn't in the eyes of the characters – if you didn't see a soul there – it would just be a big clanking machine. And I think that's what people were responding to with ... well I don't want to throw a particular movie under the bus here, but let's just say we've seen examples of motion-capture not quite getting it. It's called the uncanny valley. We've seen movies never quite get out of the uncanny valley. That's a reference to a negative effect that is created when something approaches human [in appearance] but isn't quite there, it creates this creepiness. Our goal right from the get-go is that we had to get over the uncanny valley. These characters have to be real, they have to be alive. And what the actors do has to come through 100%. We didn't want to get in and come back and muck around with a lot of key-framing where we would be animating over what the actors did. Our goal was a pure translation of the actors' performance, at least as much as the physiology of that character allowed. The actors can't act the tail, the actors can't ears, so there is a layer of animation on top of what they are doing. But if I showed you the reference video track of what [lead actors] Zoe [Saldana] and Sam [Worthington] did, I think you'd be astonished at how closely it maps to the final performance that you see. I think it's one-to-one. You know, and, we expected that maybe we'd get to 90%, maybe 95%, but I don't think we dreamed that we'd get to 100%. But we did. There's absolutely no diminishment.

GB: That's pretty confident talk! I talked to your producing partner Jon Landau and he said that you guys were referring to the work here as emotion-capture, as opposed to motion-capture. It's a catchy phrase if you guys can live up to it.

JC: We spent the first year and a half of the film – before we were truly green-lit, but we were well-funded— developing the facial performance capture system and the pipeline that would see it through to completion. We even did an end-to-end test where we captured scenes and took them out to the final photo-real record just so we understood the process. And it's a tribute to how much Weta Digital down in New Zealand has been able to evolve the state of the art beyond their own expectations at the beginning of the film. In fact we're seeing a difference now between some of the first stuff they turned in a year ago and what we're getting now. What we're getting now is actually better.

GB: Your reputation is as a perfectionist, does that mean you need to re-do some early stuff?

JC: No I don't think you'll ever feel the diminishment as you go through the movie. But we'll see a scene that was an earlier scene in process and they look great, but a newer stuff is stunning. And that stuff we haven't even showed anyone yet. We're just getting it in now. I'm about to head over to a Weta review right now, I'll probably spend the next four hours in there reviewing stuff, and I look forward to it every day. When we unpack these shots, sometimes our jaws just drop at the verisimilitude to the actors. And that's what thrills me most. I'm kind of over all the design stuff. That was the first two years. I'm kind of used to that stuff now, the floating mountains and thousand-foot trees. But when I see Sam Worthington captured exactly at a critical-performance moment -- that still gets me.

[modage]

got my reservation for Friday at 6pm

[picolas]

the preview is showing in montreal, calgary, and toronto. but not in vancouver.

it makes perfect sense really. vancouver is the 3rd most filmed in place in the world. it has lots of people who pay money to see movies in it. it has several imax screens. james cameron must find it repulsive.

[MacGuffin]

'Avatar' site crashes as fans seek tickets
16-minute sneak preview will be in theaters Friday
Source: Hollywood Reporter

The official "Avatar" Web site crashed for several hours on Monday as moviegoers rushed to secure free seats to see the 16 minutes of 3D preview footage that will be shown at 104 Imax theaters around the country on Friday evening.

Ticket ordering was scheduled to begin online at noon PDT, but at about 11:55 a.m., the site started experiencing difficulties. About 17,000 of the 68,000 available tickets were distributed before the heavy traffic forced the site down for several hours.

"Due to the overwhelming response for tickets to the 'Avatar' event on 8/21, our servers have crashed. We will update you as soon as possible," ticket seekers were advised by "Avatar's" Twitter site.

By late afternoon, avatarmovie.com was again up and running, taking five orders every second. Locations in New York and Los Angeles sold out almost immediately, and most tickets were expected to be snapped up by the end of the day.

Given that "Avatar," James Cameron's first narrative feature since 1997's "Titanic," promises a display of cutting-edge technology, the site snafu was something of an embarrassment.

At the same time, it had to be good news for Fox, which is facing the challenge of creating awareness for a movie that isn't based on a pre-existing brand, book or film. The sci-fi adventure -- with a budget the studio has put at $237 million -- opens in the U.S. on Dec. 18 and worldwide that same week.

While Fox and Cameron have been slowly unveiling footage from the film -- first at the CineExpo convention in Amsterdam in June and then at last month's Comic-Con -- Friday will be the first chance for many moviegoers to see for themselves scenes in which Australian actor Sam Worthington, playing a paralyzed Marine who travels to the planet of Pandora, finds new life as an avatar -- a blue-skinned, 10-foot tall, half-human, half-alien hybrid.

"I think to say that there is already a lot of interest in the movie is a pretty good understatement. Obviously, it blew out all the servers," said Greg Foster, Imax's chairman and president of filmed entertainment. "It's a pretty big statement about the curiosity and interest in the whole thing."

The participating Imax theaters, in between regularly scheduled screenings of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," will offer two screenings Friday of the "Avatar" footage, which will include a 30-second introduction by Cameron in which he sets up the clips. Foster said there are no plans to offer more screenings.

Fox is counting on the cachet of Cameron and its advertising and promotion to drive licensing and merchandising beginning more than two months before the movie's release.

Mattel begins shipping 28 toys to stories in early October and expects them to be on store shelves at Wal-Mart, Target and other retailers by early November.

"We're going to be pulling all the levers to make sure these are marketed properly," Mattel spokesman Chris Volk said.

"We were aware the toys would be out six weeks before the movie opens, but luckily we have Jim Cameron's name, which speaks for itself and has its own following," Fox vp licensing Virginia King added.

Lora Cohn, another vp licensing at the studio, said: "The code name for this project was 8-80, which we even use on some T-shirts, which meant that it will appeal to everyone from eight to 80."

The toys will be priced from $8.99 for a simple action figure to $26.99 for the most deluxe version.

Mattel is also counting on the action figures, creatures and vehicles from the movie to attract collectors and fans. Each figure will come with a 3D Web tag called an I-tag. When the buyer gets the toy home, they put the tag in front of a Web camera and it will reveal special content about that item such as bio background or animated models.

There will also be video games released beginning in late November for three different systems and offering two content variations, said Tim Cummings, senior PR manager for Ubisoft, the French company that developed the games in Montreal. The games for Xbox 360 and PlayStation allow the user to take the role of the hero, while a game for the Nintendo Wii allows the user to take the side of the hero or the villains in the movie. All of the games will be 3D capable but also play in a 2D version.

Ubisoft will premiere its first commercial trailer for the video games on Friday alongside the Imax showings. That day, the same trailer will be shown at the huge Gamescon trade show in Cologne, Germany.

The Xbox and PS3 versions will retail for $59.99; the Wii game will retail for $49.99.

In addition to toys and games, Fox has licenses for clothing lines for men (through Jem) and women (through Awake) that will be available at mass retailers and boutiques on Nov. 24.

Both Cohn and King said they are not concerned that toys, games and clothes will be out weeks before the movie. They said Mattel has been careful in how many units are being shipped, and they expect the toys could be sold out based on reaction to the theatrical trailers, TV ads, promotion and interest by collectors even before the movie opens.

There are also publishing licensees, Abrams and Harper Collins,  who will put out books and other print products for adults and children.

[MacGuffin]

Trailer

[picolas]

amazing.

[Stefen]

It was alright, I guess. I don't know. My hopes were just too high. It just didn't look very believable.

[MacGuffin]

It just didn't look very believable.

You didn't have the 3-D glasses on.

[Kal]

After all the bullshit about this film for years, I'm now officially excited to see it.

[Fernando]

REAL Trailer here.


EDIT: damn thing ain't loading. 

[cinemanarchist]

http://specials.divertissements.fr.msn.com/cinema/avatar/default.aspx

French trailer works.