In 1995,
James Cameron began work on a story that would, more than a
decade later, evolve into Avatar, the blockbuster of
2009 and no less than the movie event of the decade. Opening
to international critical acclaim (including nine Academy
Award® nominations) and unprecedented box-office success,
Avatar quickly, within a few short weeks, became the
highest-grossing film on record. An epic for our times, this
next-generation spectacle blends action, adventure, and
romance with a timely message of ecological responsibility
while using, and inventing, cutting-edge technologies to
transport audiences to a lush, fully realized alien
world.
No less epic, however, was the
groundbreaking and exhaustive process of bringing the film
to life. Early brainstorming sessions in Malibu jumpstarted
a vast production effort that ultimately spanned several
years and multiple continents. The Making of Avatar
reveals never-before-seen illustrations and photographs,
with a text that charts the technical challenges,
innovations, and discoveries that made the film's
breakthroughs possible. Working in tandem, artists and
technicians created new tools and processes to realize the
film's vision, including those for performance capture,
which allows the nuances of the actors' performances to be
translated faithfully to their digital characters; a virtual
camera system, which empowered Cameron to direct within a
virtual world with unprecedented range, generate real-time
composites, and blend live action and special effects more
naturally and intuitively than ever before; and stereoscopic
photography, which produced the most immersive 3-D
experience to date. Here is the behind-the-scenes
celebration of this monumental undertaking, the official
record of how Cameron, the actors, and the crew made a film,
and made history.