The trailer for James Cameron’s new film, the eagerly awaited science fiction epic Avatar will be debuted this Friday, the 21st of August – and Rimini will be one of the very few places where you’ll be able to see the 3d version, at the IMAX cinema in the Befane shopping complex.
the 3d trailer for james cameron's new film avatar will be screened this friday in Rimini's IMAX theatre
Cameron, the Canadian director of some of the world’s biggest grossing films, like Titanic, and Terminator, has in the twelve years since his last film (the one with Kate Winslett, Leonardo di Caprio, and that gut-churning Celine Dion song!) worked in collaboration with Vince Pace on the new 3d camera fusion system, so it’s fair to say that for fans of his work the 3d trailer should be unmissable!
There’s an interesting Italian link with Cameron. He started in the movie business at the technical end, working as a special effects designer and later art-director. His first chance at the director’s chair for a big film happened while working on the effects for the sequel to Piranha, imaginatively titled Piranha II – the spawning. At the start of the shoot the then director of the project walked out, leaving Italian based producer Ovidio Assonitis with little-choice but to ask Cameron to step up for the role.
Finding himself working with an Italian crew which spoke no english, and a series of financial hurdles to overcome, Cameron eventually turned down the film – but the anxiety which he suffered during the production process apparently led to his dreaming about a robot hit-man sent back from the future to kill him, a dream which he turned into the hit-movie Terminator!
He’s come a long way since then, obviously, and fans will be eager to see the 3d trailer for Avatar. The film is due out this December, though it’s based on a screenplay Cameron wrote back in 1995. Similar to T-2, the film has had to wait for technology to catch up with Cameron’s requirements. He aimed to film Avatar using virtual actors, and only now has the technology become sufficiently sophisticated to make this goal possible. Speaking about the system, that allowed him to watch and direct the virtual actions like a live shoot, Cameron said:
“It’s like a big, powerful game engine. If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can. I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature and go through it on a 50 to 1 scale.”
The end result is a hybrid live-action computer generated movie ( about 60/40), where ‘Ideally at the end of the day the audience has no idea which they’re looking at’.
Avatar is the story of an ex-Marine who finds himself thrust into hostilities on an alien planet filled with exotic life forms. As an Avatar, a human mind in an alien body, he finds himself torn between two worlds, in a desperate fight for his own survival and that of the indigenous people.
The 3d trailer for Avatar will be shown at the Befane centre’s IMAX theatre, in Rimini, this Friday between 20.30 and 22.30