As far as the look and tone of it, it feels like:
2 Parts classic Cameron, 1 part King Kong (Skull Island in the Jackson remake), 1 part Last of the Mohicans, and a pinch of Lord of the Rings.
I think the story itself, will be about on par with The Abyss.
Will there be chase scenes?
Because let’s face it, Cameron is the greatest director of chase scenes alive, perhaps ever. So long as the movie contains instances of characters running away from other characters, I’ll be happy.
It’s a pass from me. I don’t see a great deal of improvement over that Final Fantasy all computer graphics movie from eight years ago. This just looks like a cutscene from a video game.
I think it looks fantastic, whether it’s revolutionary or not. Already in love with it. Also, don’t forget that there’s four months of effects tweaking yet to happen – teasers always have half-finished effects.
That said, the backlash will be on the level of Star Wars: Episode I. “Ten years for this???” “His first SF movie since T2 and we get a blue Jar Jar Binks???” will be the geeks’ reactions, whereas others will simply say, “Meh, Titanic was so much better…”
Looks great. Though, my wife having been working on this for a while has been pushing how it’s supposed to bridge the uncanny valley and it definitely doesn’t do that. The computer animation looks like computer animation and is still kind of rigid.
Yes, as we have been making fun of it for about two years now as, “Fern Gully meets the Matrix.”
I meant Fern Gully meets Halo.
The whole trailer looks like a cover of *Heavy Metal *Magazine, circa 1981.
Does anyone have another link that doesn’t require Quicktime?
There’s a compressed non-Quicktime here.
I disagree that animation is rigid. If anything it is too fluid, and seems to be lacking the weight, and impact of real objects. It’s particularly noticeable in the scene where one blue guy mounts up on the dragon-things back. The whole thing seems to suffer from “soap-opera camera” syndrome. Everything seems too smooth.
Inertia is the bane of hand-animation.
See, I would still describe that as rigid. You know what else moves smoothly? Trains, on rails. When I saw ‘rigid’ I mean precisely what you have described, the motion doesn’t appear natural it appears programmed.
For me it’s very easy to tell the quality of the animation. It’s all in the eyes and the mouth. As far as it goes, I would say that the artists over at Valve did a better job with emotional expression on Team Fortress 2 than they have done here.
The space cat-elves look like horrible plastic surgery mistakes more than anything. Their lips are drawn and don’t move very well, same with their eyes. Basically it’s about the skin. I just look at them and all I can think of is, “Botox, botox, botox.” That sort of weird botox tension that occurs that makes a person’s face so much less expressive. The bane of Hollywood that takes beautiful women and makes them ugly.
Of course if the animators are watching people from Hollywood, then it’s right within the norm, because that’s how expressive all the plastic surgery cases really are.
Gotcha. I did notice that they eyes seem particularly well done though. I never noticed a lazy eye like I did in Beowulf.
Well I meant the skin around the eyes, not the eyes themselves.
They’re being animated by Weta Studios in New Zealand (a friend of mine is a compositor on it). For that reason I expect they will probably have a similar style to them as what was seen in LOTR or King Kong.
As opposed to ILM, who did Pirates of the Caribbean’s Davy Jones so flawlessly.
Ahh interesting. With King Kong the job was relatively simple as they only had to worry about the expressiveness of one character. These creatures are definitely reminiscent of the orcs. I didn’t much like the LotR movies but not because of the computer animation.
Yes, that was a good job. It’s weird though, District 9 did a great job with it, the ships looked much more real. In this Avatar preview even one of the loading mecha looks like a cartoon. I’m suprised they can’t even do as well as District 9.
It’s basically Dances With Wolves meets The Abyss.
lol
Gorillas in the Mist meets Blade Runner?
It looks interesting, and I will see it, but the premise doesn’t shout “must see” in a way that I’m feeling any anticipation for it, and while one or two scenes look above average effects wise, most of them seem average or even sub par both in visuals and in character movement. I am looking forward to the 3D aspect though.