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Avatar Release To Kick Off Million Tree Planting Initiative

Source: Ecorazzi - While we’re not sure if anything about the DVD itself will be green, we’re happy to announce that Twentieth Century Fox isn’t just using Earth Day as it’s marketing bitch for Avatar. At a press conference today, the studio and its billion-dollar director James Cameron announced a partnership with the Earth Day Network to plant one million trees in honor of the film by the end of 2010.

“I am pleased to have the opportunity to share the environmental messages from AVATAR through the efforts during the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day and with Earth Day Network,” said James Cameron. “Earth Day Network’s commitment and actions to promote a healthy, sustainable planet go hand-in-hand with the themes of AVATAR.”

The non-profit, which is committed to caring for and nurturing the trees to maturity, will plant native species in more than 15 different countries. Natural disasters such as fires and landslides will also be considered during the planting process.

“AVATAR sends a universal message about the danger of exploiting our natural resources and brings to the forefront of the global consciousness the need to protect our planet and humanity, said Kathleen Rogers, President, Earth Day Network. “We hope this commitment from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment to plant one million trees, will inspire others to stand up against climate change for Earth Day.”

Why 'Avatar' lost: 5 theories

Source: The Week - [Finding humor in the 'analysis' of the 'politics' of academy voting, lol] Is Avatar too anti-American? Too computer-generated? Inside the biggest Oscars' upset in years Best Opinion:  LA Times, Hollywood Reporter, Telegraph, Gawker, SF Chronicle

This was the year the Academy expanded the number of Best Picture contenders to 10, largely to give more popular films a chance. Yet James Cameron's Avatar, history's biggest box-office performer, lost the top prize to The Hurt Locker, the lowest-grossing movie to win Best Picture in recent times. Here's five theories on why Avatar got left in the dust:

1. Actors hate computer graphics
Actors constitute the Academy's largest voting bloc, says Patrick Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times, and they're particularly "queasy about rewarding a special-effects driven film [like Avatar] that...did little to honor the actors' craft." The Academy, in general, still rejects "films largely created and sculpted in the computer," even "game-changing" blockbusters like Avatar.

2. Science fiction never wins Best Picture
Avatar is just the latest hit "doomed because it's sci-fi, a genre that has rarely been rewarded by Oscar," says Alex Ben Block in The Hollywood Reporter. Remember: Star Wars lost to Woody Allen's Annie Hall, and E.T. lost to Gandhi. Though The Hurt Locker managed to avoid Oscar's "Iraq War curse," Avatar couldn't "sidestep the science-fiction label."

3. Patriotism beat out anti-Americanism
Even though Hollywood is "overwhelmingly left-wing," it rejected the "overtly anti-American and anti-military" Avatar, says Nile Gardiner in The Daily Telegraph — uncharacteristically backing The Hurt Locker. This suggests that voters really considered it the better film. Hopefully Cameron will focus on a compelling storyline next time.

4. Hollywood is elitist and navel-gazing
Avatar would clearly have won a national popular vote, says Brian Moylan in Gawker. But "the Oscars are not about America, they are about Hollywood," and shoring up its ego. Like Sunday's Oscars telecast, Hollywood is a "complete self-referential mess."

5. The Hurt Locker is brilliant in ways Avatar is not
"The bottom line is that it's easier to make a movie with great special effects," says Zennie Abraham in the San Francisco Chronicle, "than a timely film with a good story." The Best Picture Oscar is supposed to go to the story that makes you think about the world around you, and The Hurt Locker, "in so many ways, was that movie." Avatar was not.

Live or Memorex? 'Avatar' Raises Oscar question

Source: Yahoo - "Lord of the Rings" fans once lamented the twisted little fiend Gollum - created by a blend of human performance and digital effects - didn't get his due during Hollywood's awards season.

Years later, the combination of live-action performance overlaid with computer animation has hit a new peak with "Avatar" — an awards favorite this season, even though the performers beneath all that digital wizardry have gone overlooked for acting honors.

"Avatar" is tied for the lead at the Academy Awards with nine nominations, among them best picture, director for James Cameron, musical score and most of the technical categories.

The science-fiction sensation's stars — Zoe Saldana, Sam Worthington and Sigourney Weaver — drew solid praise, though not necessarily the sort of raves that would have hurled them into the thick of the Oscar acting race.

Yet the technology raises an is-it-live-or-is-it-Memorex question: Does the performance come from the actors or the animators?

Nothing in the Oscar-voting rules prohibits these "performance-capture" roles — or even voice work — from earning acting nominations. Yet as lifelike as digitally-assisted characters might look, there remains a sense in Hollywood they are more a result of technical innovation than acting talent.

Cameron and others suggest it might be a matter of enlightening the industry as to what's really involved in performance-capture roles — where actors perform on bare soundstages, with digital cameras and sensors capturing their body language and visual-effects artists later filling in costumes, features and other details.

"There's nothing to say that they would have been nominated had it been an even playing field and had there been performances photographed instead of captured," Cameron said. "But I do think that there is an issue here where the acting community needs to be educated about what it is performance-capture really is, especially the way we did it on 'Avatar,' where we preserved every nuance of the performance.

"And hopefully, if we could overcome that learning curve over the next couple years, then next time a performance-capture film comes along, that it will be an even playing field."

Worthington and Weaver appear in much of "Avatar" as their human selves, their performance-capture alter-egos coming in portions where the characters take on the form of the 10-foot-tall Na'vi, the dominant species on the distant moon Pandora.

Saldana plays a native Na'vi, her entire role delivered through performance-capture.

For Worthington, the work he did in his performance-capture scenes — wearing a skintight suit covered with sensor dots read by the digital cameras — was as much an acting job as his live-action sequences.

"It is a performance. It hasn't been animated on top of that. That to me was a big thing, that they don't enhance my performance in any way," Worthington said. "Whatever we did does translate exactly 100 percent. Maybe my nose is animated and my tail. That's because I don't have a tail. And the ears are a bit different, but those are about the only things they've changed."

Cameron even strapped tails and big ears on the actors playing the Na'vi so their performances would reflect the body language of creatures with those appendages, Worthington said.

Convincing more conventional actors such as Anthony Mackie of the worthiness of performance-capture could be a Na'vi-sized challenge, indeed.

"'Avatar' was good, but it wasn't a movie, it was a spectacle," said Mackie, who has a supporting role in "The Hurt Locker," "Avatar's" stiffest competition in this year's Oscar race. "I'm excited to see exactly how they reward the work we do."

Some feel Hollywood's lack of recognition for performance-capture is a matter of inexperience.

"I really do think there is a prejudice among certainly many actors against these kind of performances — particularly from actors who have never done it before," said Entertainment Weekly film reporter Dave Karger, who covers Hollywood and the Oscars.

"Until people are educated about what goes into a performance-capture film, I don't think anyone will ever have a chance to get nominated from one."

The debate over what might constitute an awards-worthy performance is not new. In 1992, Robin Williams earned Oscar buzz for his effervescent voice role in the animated adventure "Aladdin," though the chatter did not result in a nomination.

Andy Serkis won high praise for his work as Gollum in the last two "Lord of the Rings" films, his character created through motion-capture filming that was a precursor to the more-immersive technology Cameron used on "Avatar."

"Really, it's terrible that Gollum didn't win an award. He was brilliant. He's the main thing in the movie," said "Avatar" co-star Weaver, who earned a best-actress nomination for Cameron's "Aliens."

So far, there have been only a handful of films featuring substantive performances created this way, including Robert Zemeckis' "The Polar Express," "Beowulf" and "A Christmas Carol."

Zemeckis plans to keep working in performance-capture, and the runaway success of Cameron's "Avatar" makes sequels likely and may inspire other directors to try out the technology.

Sooner or later, the technology may produce an undeniably great performance that forces awards voters to consider it alongside searing live-action roles such as those delivered this season by Oscar front-runners Jeff Bridges in "Crazy Heart" or Mo'Nique in "Precious."

"A Christmas Carol" producers Steve Starkey and Jack Rapke borrow a line from Ray Winstone, who played the title role in their and Zemeckis' "Beowulf."

"What Ray Winstone said is the difference between this and live action is that in live action, you go into hair and makeup, you go into wardrobe, and then you act," Starkey said. "In this, you act, and then they put on your hair and makeup. There is no difference. You're acting in both, and I say it should be considered as a real performance."

27 Avatar Questions, Answered By The Movie's Designers

After seeing Avatar for the second or third time, I'm sure that you've got as many questions as I do. Check out the entired article for some interesting tidbits reaching into the depths of Pandora and her natives. 

Source: io9 - The Na'Vi are warriors and stuff. So do the different Na'Vi tribes go to war against each other pretty often?

Greer considered this question in depth, in the process of creating Na'Vi warpaint and war gear. He decided that the Na'Vi don't have wars any more. But they "do put a lot of effort into numerous annual gatherings where they "compete" for their specific tribe's honor and pride in various skills based competitions. I saw these kind of gatherings as the pivotal interaction, on a worldwide basis, between the various tribes." And they are pretty good at killing each other, when the need arises. (But this was something Greer developed internally at Weta, so it's not gospel.)

So why are Pandora's trees green like Earth trees, when everything else is so weirdly colored?

As we mentioned in our previous design feature, there was a huge push among some of the designers to make the foliage of Pandora cyan-colored instead of green. This turned out to be a problem because of creating depth perception, but also Stromberg opposed it — it would have made the "atmospheric haze" harder see because it was also cyan. But also it would have been too much. "We had to have something that the average person could grab onto as a comfort level, so we could capture them, and slowly introduce these things and not hit them over the head with the clown hammer."

What was the inspiration for those weird trumpet-like flowers, that collapse when Jake touches them?

Craig Shoji says those were based on "Christmas-tree worms," that you find attached to a reef underwater. They behave like that, and it's incredibly cool if you ever get to touch one.

The Na'Vi look like a lot of different native peoples on Earth, with their warpaint and their weapons and so on. Were they actually based on Earth tribes?

Designer Craig Shoji says he and other designers used a lot of different real-life items: Inspiration came from many sources, but a lot involved looking at current indigenous people of the world including those inhabiting the rain forest like the Penan tribe, and the Kayapo and Yanomami indians. Also the different tribes in Africa like the Himba, Masai, and Samburu. As well as all the different forms of face and body painting that took place in all the different tribal settings. There were thousands upon thousands upon hundreds upon millions upon mucho reference pictures that we were collecting and looking at. It became sort of an obsession for Seth and myself to constantly have our 'Na'vi-esque' radar on so whenever we saw something we'd automatically buy it, save-as, or take a picture to add to the collection. It varied from those woven toy finger traps found in Chinatown, to images of Lee Bontecou's amazing sculptural work. We'd then analyze it to try and break down what was working and what we liked. Was it aesthetic? The material? The simple, yet sophisticated mechanism in how it worked? And then we'd riff on those concepts to create designs that would live in the Na'vi world.

Read all 27 Avatar Questions here

Is the 'Avatar' Concept Really Possible?

Source: (CNN) - Now the highest-grossing film ever, "Avatar," has captivated millions of viewers with its picturesque scenery, extraterrestrial battles, and nature-loving, blue-skinned aliens.

The premise of the film is that humans can enter the world of these 10-foot aliens, called the Na'vi, by way of half-human, half-Na'vi hybrids. A high-tech interfacing mechanism allows a human to remain inert while controlling one of these avatar hybrids just by thinking.

Not only does the human manipulate the avatar's movements and speech, but he or she also experiences life -- every sensation, feeling and emotion -- through the eyes of the hybrid, as if consciousness were transferred.

Scientists say we are many decades, even centuries, away from making this kind of sophisticated interaction possible, if it can be done at all. But the fundamentals of components required to create this complicated system of mind-controlled avatars are already in the works, and have useful applications in medicine.

"We're starting to understand the basic building blocks, but the biggest challenges will be emotion and thought -- how to make another organism think what you think, to feel what you feel -- because those networks are much more difficult to sort out," said Dr. Brian Litt, associate professor of neurology and bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

Although nothing as complex as manipulating a creature through thought has been done, scientists working on allowing handicapped people to move prosthetic limbs with their minds are making headway. This idea actually played a role in the movie: Protagonist Jake Sully was in a wheelchair in his human body, but could walk, run and jump as his avatar.

One demonstration has been shown by Miguel Nicolelis, a neuroscientist at Duke University, who is working on robotic leg braces. In 2008, his group got a monkey in North Carolina to mentally control the walking patterns of a robot in Japan.

This was done by implanting electrodes in the brains of two rhesus monkeys. The electrodes recorded how cells in the brain's motor and sensory cortex responded to walking on the treadmill at various speeds. The monkeys' legs also had sensors to record walking patterns.

Researchers used all this information to predict the exact speed of movement and stride length of the legs, and uploaded that information to a robot in Japan, getting the robot to move in synch with a monkey thousands of miles away in real time. Even when the treadmill was turned off, a monkey continued making the robot walk just by thinking for a few minutes.

Another arena is one of virtual reality: controlling an avatar in a video game with your mind. Jaime Pineda, cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, is working with a brain-computer interface that allows participants to move a car around a racetrack, fly a plane and do other virtual tasks on a screen, simply by thinking. The mental training for this takes about four to six hours, he said.

"It is based on the motor parts of your brain. That's what we're recording from, and so if you think about moving, it's actually as if you are actually moving," he said.

Apart from the entertainment value, Pineda sees this as a future therapy for autistic children. The theory is that because people with autism have less conductivity between various parts of the brain, participating in mind-controlled video games may normalize those circuits. Results from his lab show improvement in social interaction and other behaviors after 10 or 20 weeks of playing the game in the lab.

Uploading information

For an "Avatar"-style brain-computer interface, an enormous amount of data would have to be transferred from the person to the avatar extremely quickly, Litt said.

Here's what's possible now: Scientists such as Gerwin Schalk at the New York State Department of Health's Wadsworth Center have harnessed the brain's electrical impulses to have people mentally type their thoughts using electrodes on the surface of the head. The rate is typically seven words per minute. In one epileptic patient who had electrodes already on the brain for clinical purposes, the record was 20 words per minute.

This kind of technology is useful for people who are paralyzed and cannot communicate, Schalk said. His research group also works on using electrodes to extract specific information from the brain such as people's actual actions, imagined actions and intended actions -- even how they move individual fingers.

The research "has changed that widespread assumption that it's not really impossible to acquire detailed information from the brain in humans," Schalk said.

Understanding brain networks

In order to construct a high-tech interface that would allow two-way communication between an avatar and a person, there must be a better understanding of the brain itself, Litt said.

Litt's group studies the brain's networks involved in epilepsy. The researchers are looking at the abnormal circuits to figure out the basic units of the brain that generate seizures. They have licensed intellectual property for a device that can improve epilepsy by stimulating specific brain regions, potentially eliminating the need for surgery.

"I see tremendous possibilities for more and more ability to unlock these networks," he said.

Transferal of sensations and emotions

The area of this "avatar science" that will be most difficult to sort out is being able to feel and think as the avatar, Litt said.

Today there are auditory prostheses called cochlear implants that encode signals that allow people to hear who could not otherwise, as well as rudimentary visual aids. It is also possible to stick a pin in a particular part of someone's brain and induce sensations of various temperatures, pressures and even pain levels, just by stimulating certain neural circuits.

"But there's a far cry from doing that to being able to make somebody feel an emotion or see something," Litt said.

The technical hurdles, including transferring huge amounts of information extremely rapidly and building devices to both extract signals from the brain and inject signals into the brain, are significant, he said.

Clearly, people aren't going to be able to climb into personal pods and use their brains to remotely control 10-foot-tall creatures any time soon. Andrew Schwartz, neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh, added in an e-mail that it is not even clear what "consciousness" is. There's no rigorous definition, and how it looks in the brain is unknown.

"It's a wonderful movie, but it shouldn't be taken as anything but fantasy," he said.

We Are Avatar!

Source: Mikki Willis of Elevate Films - (For those who have yet to experience Avatar nothing is written here that will spoil it)

Rarely do I see a hyped blockbuster on opening day. But in this case, the night before James Cameron's Avatar officially opened in Los Angeles my wife attended a midnight sneak preview. I was awake when Nadia returned home well past 3 A.M. She was floating. I'd seen her floating many times before. But this was a new float. Her feet were firmly on the ground, eyes clear and laser focused. Her voice had that unique resonance that I've come to expect after we've been through a life changing experience together. I was in a matinee the next day!

Though I hold deep respect for Mr. Cameron’s body of work, I can’t say that I’ve ever been a fan. That changed within the first act of Avatar. I must admit, I did not expect the emotional depth and pure sensitivity that pored from every 3D frame of his latest masterpiece. Yes, the technical accomplishments are groundbreaking, but it was the heart and purpose of Avatar that reached me. Because my path has led to environmental and socially conscious filmmaking, the last several years of my life has been blessed in ceremony with indigenous people. While their rituals vary from circle to circle, their prayers and prophecies are astonishingly similar. Divided by continents, without ever having read a book or Bible, seen a television, or used any form of modern communication device, miraculously they’ve received the same download. They are simply connected to the source, call it what you wish. All of nature is in constant communication. As far as I can tell, it is only we humans, particularly us Westerners who have forgotten how to access our natural and unfiltered intelligence. But that, I’m elated to say, is rapidly changing! Thanks to films like the Matrix and now Avatar, American cinema is helping to awaken our senses!

Avatar’s female lead is Neytiri, the most powerful articulation of the Goddess-warrior to ever make it to the big screen. Period. She represents the divine feminine that resides in the heart of every woman, young and old. Even in digital form she is the real deal. Neytiri is innocent, yet infinitely wise and intuitive, fierce, yet sensitive, and dare I say… seriously sexy!

Jake represents the new man. He is both an infant and a warrior. Despite his handicap, he is fearless and unstoppable. Though he is unaware, Jake is not dumb. He is just wise enough, secure enough, and humble enough to learn from the divine Goddess. In doing so Jake evolves from crippled soldier to Hero-warrior.

Disguised as a Hollywood blockbuster, Avatar is art imitating life to the highest and finest degree. The visual imagery, sound and script are literally encoded with ancient teachings. The message is bold and clear: To evolve beyond the level of thinking that created our current global issues, we must reconnect with our ancestral roots and reunite as one tribe. Though told through a fantasy tale, Avatar is based on a true story. Our story. Regardless of where you are, or where you come from, this message is specifically for you. It is a bold invitation, perhaps even an initiation into higher and deeper experience of yourself and your world.

Tears rolled from behind my designer 3D shades as I sat paralyzed in my stadium seat, spellbound by remembrance, aware of sniffling humans around me, wondering if they too were feeling what I was feeling; Gratitude for my fellow filmmaker James Cameron for rising beyond the shadows and shining so bright! Gratitude for being alive during this historical moment of human evolution! Gratitude for the privilege of standing as a warrior and a witness to the awakening of who and what we truly are!

"I see you"

Mikki Willis - PS. If inspired, please support the conscious movement by forwarding this message to the masses. Thank you!

(Mikki Willis is the founder of the world’s largest socially conscious filmmaking challenge Elevate Film Festival.)

www.ElevateFilms.com / Facebook search: Mikki Willis