AvatarTechnologies

Avatar is a movie directed by James Cameron (Director of Titanic) & it was released in Dec'09. The budget of this film was $237 million with $150 million reserved for promotion according to a studio spokesperson. Cameron said his inspiration for the movie plot came from every science fiction book he had read as a kid.

Avatar's footage is 70% CGI, including the female lead. Various technologies had to be produced specifically for the production stage of the film, these technologies included a new lighting system for use in massive areas (Pandora's jungles), a motion capture stage (the cast donned motion-sensor leotards) & a new and improved method of capturing facial expressions in which the actors had to wear skull caps fitted with a tiny camera and the information collected was then transferred to a computer. A virtual monitor was created to view the motion capture results in real time, instead of waiting for the computer to render them. Cameron also developed a special filming rig consisting of a number of stethoscopic cameras mimicking the human eye. The lead visual effects company was Weta Digital an they had to employ 900 people at one time to work on the film in order for it to finish in time. ILM was responsible for the films specialized vehicles and they devised a new way to make CGI explosions.

Various methods were used to market Avatar. One of them being the release of exclusive images by Empire magazine 2 months before the release date. Another strategy used was to chose Leona Lewis, a famous British singer to sing the theme song for the movie and then premiering the music video right after the London release of the movie. The Coca-Cola company collaborated with twentieth century fox to launch a worldwide marketing campaign, with the highlight being the website AVTR.com. Specially marked bottles and cans of Coca-Cola Zero, when held in front of a web-cam enabled users to interact with the websites 3D features using augmented reality technology. The trailer of the film was also premiered at a football game at Cowboys stadium, Texas. One of the largest video displays. Various books were released before the official release of the movie. Two of them were The Reusable Scrapbook for children and The Art of Avatar including detailed production artwork. Avatar: The Game was created by Ubisoft Montreal and was released on most gaming consoles including PS3, XBOX 360 & WiiMattel Toys a world famous company, launched Avatar action figures which included a 3-D web tag called an i-TAG. This particular i-TAG can be scanned using a web-cam and then special content is revealed made for each specific action figure. This can be done at avataritag.com

The film was originally supposed to be released in May'09 however it was pushed back to allow more post production time and to give more time to theaters worldwide to install 3-D projectors.

Fatima Masud.