LOS ANGELES ? Will ?Avatar,? perhaps the year?s most awaited film, make ?Titanic? director James Cameron ?King of the World? again?

James was like a brand-new dad, eager to show off his new baby, when he met us at the office of Lightstorm Entertainment, his production company in Santa Monica, California. ?Avatar? is a digital 3D film set in the future on a distant moon called Pandora. Humans have descended on Pandora to look for valuable minerals, a development that threatens the existence of Pandora?s indigenous population called the Na?vi?humanoids who are 10 feet tall, blue skinned, with cat-like ears and tails, live harmoniously but now their warrior abilities are unleashed.

Humans are unable to breathe the air on Pandora so they have created human/Na?vi hybrids known as Avatars, each of whom is controlled by a human driver through a technology that links the driver?s mind to his Avatar body. The film?s protagonist, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), is an ex-Marine who is paralyzed from the waist down but through his Avatar body, he is whole again in Pandora, where he falls in love with a Na?vi woman, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). The epic action adventure fantasy, all conceived by James, also stars Michelle Rodriguez, Sigourney Weaver, Giovanni Ribisi, Stephen Lang and Laz Alonso.

Visually stunning world

Now to the footage. James showed us a featurette that was nine minutes longer than the sneak peek that he showed on Imax screens worldwide last Friday. James has created a visually stunning world of lush forests and deep gorges, breathtakingly beautiful and menacing at the same since there are ferocious dinosaur-like beasts and gentle phosphorescent creatures that descend on Jake?s arms and shoulders. Jake and Neytiri walk on grounds that radiate light with each step.

If the finished film lives up to the dazzling sights promised by the featurette, and if the story and characters are just as involving as the visual effects, then James may be king again in December when ?Avatar? is released. Maricel Pagulayan (?Valkyrie,? ?Where the Wild Things Are,? ?Superman Returns?), whom we?ve featured before, is one of several Fil-Am visual effects wizards tapped by James.

So far, the buzz is good for James? first feature film since his Leonardo DiCaprio-Kate Winslet epic won a record-tying 11 Oscar trophies in 1997.

After the screening, the director of the biggest box office hit of all time and producer Jon Landau took us upstairs where some of the props such as spears, costumes, models of the sets and of Jake and Neytiri were on display in one room.

100 percent done

?In the most important respects as a director, I?m 100 percent done because the film is shot and edited,? the silver-haired auteur replied when we asked what he still needs to do between now and December. ?My job for the next few months until we deliver at the end of November is more as a visual effects person, working to make sure that the shots look real, that they?re all up to an even standard.?

?In terms of a film?s cut, the studio has seen it,? he declared. ?They were pretty happy with it. You saw finished material so there are whole sections of the film that are actually done. It?s just a question of getting in some of the remaining scenes from what we call template level where it looks like a video game up to the level of photo-realism. All the template stuff was turned over to WETA (Digital, Peter Jackson?s visual effects company) like a year ago or in some cases, six months ago for the shots that will come in last. The process is quite labor intensive. I?m working 14, 16 hours a day but all the major creative decisions have been made.?

Of the world he created from scratch, James explained: ?Pandora is a very Earth-like world in the sense that it has trees, foliage, wildlife but you can?t breathe the air as a human being. So the human presence on Pandora is confined to what is called the base which is actually a mining colony. If you want to go out and interact with the indigenous people of Pandora, either you have to use breathing equipment or you have to use these Avatar bodies. These bodies are a way of remote projecting your consciousness into a biological body. So the thing to keep in mind is that it?s not like ?The Matrix? or any other virtual reality film where a character goes into a virtual body, into a virtual world. This is a real, tangible physical world and you?re inhabiting a biological body.?

Ecology, human greed

Asked to elaborate on the story, James answered: ?We?re basically telling the story of the Americas and to a certain extent some of the other areas in the world that were conquered by the British, Dutch and so on, but we?re really telling the story of what happens when a technologically superior culture comes into a place with resources that the conquerors want.?

The filmmaker confirmed the viewers? impression that ecology and human greed are underlying themes. ?What the movie is about on a thematic level is what we?re losing every day,? he said. ?We?re losing not only in the natural world but us as part of the natural world. It?s easy to say the movie is about the humans versus the Na?vi. But the Na?vi represent something of ourselves that we are losing. We want to be like them because they?re a reflection of who we would like to be in some ways. We want to be harmonious, wiser, more spiritual and physical at the same time.?

James revealed: ?I had planned to make this film before ?Titanic.? I wrote the treatment of ?Avatar? in spring 1995. It is a film I?ve always wanted to make. It was just a question of when. But it was driven by the maturation of technology. Then I wanted to make the film right after ?Titanic? which would have been around 1998. I was told pretty much right away that it wasn?t going to be possible.?

Performance, not animation

?The photo-realism of facial CG for humanoid characters had to improve significantly,? he added. ?Peter Jackson forming WETA and doing the Gollum character in ?The Lord of the Rings? films demonstrated to me that technologically, it could be done. We were going quite significantly beyond what Peter had done with Gollum because we have multiple characters based on different actors. Gollum was largely a key frame even at that time even though the performance was based on what Andy Serkis has done. By key frame, I mean that animators actually sit there and animate it. I didn?t want it to be animation. I wanted it to be performance. I wanted it to be what the actors did.

?If I showed you what Zoe, Sam and Laz had done, you?d see that it?s exactly what the characters do. These aren?t characters by committee. They?re characters that are performed by the actors. Their body and facial performances are captured.

Technological breakthroughs

He tried to explain the film?s technological breakthroughs in as simple terms as possible: ?We basically made up a whole vocabulary to go with our new tools that we were creating. I?m not saying that we invented motion capture. We didn?t but the motion capture was just the foundation from which we went onward with the image-based facial performance capture which we did create with the simulcam system. It allowed us to take the virtual world and the live action photographic world and put them together.

?So that when I was operating my live action camera, my 3-D camera, when I had it on my shoulders and I was operating a scene with actors, I could actually see the virtual world at the same time in my eye piece which was phenomenal. That was unprecedented. We did all this unprecedented stuff but you have to be willing to go through the painful steps of creating those things and going from an idea to a prototype to a production ready tool set in a very rapid timeframe.?

Na?vi language

James even had a new language created with the help of a linguistics professor. ?We created the language of the Na?vi starting about the time that I was doing the shooting draft of the script so that would have been in the first quarter of 2006,? he said. ?Dr. Paul Frommer, who was with USC (University of Southern California) at the time, spent about a year creating the language. The trick was we had the language before we actually cast most of the parts. So the casting director, Margery Simkin, had to learn a bit of Na?vi so that she could get the auditioning actors to repeat the sounds of the language. If they couldn?t make the sounds, they couldn?t have the part.?

On Avatars having tails, James smiled and said, ?The studio asked me the same question. They asked, ?Do they have to have tails?? We?re very happy with the way the Na?vi worked out because what we found is the tail and the ears show the characters? emotional state. A cat owner knows that you can tell a cat?s mood by what its tail is doing. Just as we created a verbal language, we created a vocabulary for the tail and the ears.?

Do we sense a sequel? With a grin, James said, ?If we make money, we?ll make another one.?

E-mail the columnist at rvnepales_5585@yahoo.com and read his blog, ?The Nepales Report,? on http://blogs.inquirer.net/nepalesreport.