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View Full Version : Avatar (film) - Special effects appreciation



Neil
07-Nov-2013, 09:49 AM
I was flicking around stations last night, and up came Avatar. Now... I know there many folks that don't like this film, and before I start can I simply say I don't want to hear about that - because these individuals always seem to feel the need to jump on a soap box and declare it...

Anyway, my point is, as I was sitting the watch this flick I realised that in many scenes the blur between reality and fiction was gone. I simply could not tell what in the scenes was real and what wasn't. If that's the level of visual effect 4-5yrs ago, then God knows what Cameron will bring to the table in 2016.

MinionZombie
07-Nov-2013, 10:16 AM
Great minds think alike - I too was flicking around last night and landed on Avatar's final battle sequence on Film4+1, and was thinking to myself that - as you say - the line between what is real and what is CGI is really blurred. Some things you know are CGI, and yet, because of the detail you believe them to be real (e.g. the 'life' in Neytiri's eyes as she looks at the chaos unfolding around her), but then other things like plant life look totally real even when they're CGI replacements.

There was a bit when Jake Sully's male Na'vi nemesis (forget the name, but the one that was originally going to be Neytiri's chap) is fighting on that cargo plane thingy, on the open back door (before he gets snuffed out), where the movement didn't quite feel real to me. Perhaps they were trying to get a feel of the movement of the craft affecting the Na'vi man's own movements, but it looked a bit strange ... also, there was one shot where it almost felt like the background and the foreground (the Na'vi bloke) didn't seem to be connected to each other and sort of had this weird disconnect ... ... other than that though, yeah, I was still rather impressed by the look and thought exactly that - 'blimey, this was 2009, so what will Avatar 2 through 4 look like in a couple of year's time?!'

Neil
07-Nov-2013, 10:29 AM
^^ Spooky!

You didn't also have that dream last night about Demi Moore and the tub of Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey too?

MinionZombie
07-Nov-2013, 12:01 PM
^^ Spooky!

You didn't also have that dream last night about Demi Moore and the tub of Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey too?

Sadly not. I instead had a dream about being lost in a maze-like nightmare version of London, which was nothing but over-priced clothing stores with no windows and sniffy staff members who did nothing but look down on me and badger me to get out of their shops, but wherever I went it was another damned store with a hidden exit that would only lead to confusing alleyways and rooftops.

And then I had another dream that I was in the movie "Sunshine", except it was all real, without the psychopath, and we were setting up the bomb to re-start the Sun, but it was as if it was a giant tragedy (like a strange treatise against the nuclear bomb).

Very strange ... not a single actress covered in ice cream anywhere. :p

Neil
07-Nov-2013, 12:27 PM
I really don't dream very much now :(

MinionZombie
07-Nov-2013, 03:56 PM
I really don't dream very much now :(

And the award for most depressing-sounding sentence on HPOTD goes to...

:lol: