The Onion couldn’t have made this up and it be this funny. They bring in:
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Film director James Cameron, because of his vast experience filming underwater!
ETA: WTF??? This is the best we can do?
Eh, it doesn’t sound crazy. If you want sharp, real-time video at depth, it makes sense to bring in someone who’s done that before.
At this point whatever works!
They got the wrong guy. They really wanted Kevin Costner
I admit, I laughed at first, but it does make some sense. The dude’s spent a lot of money making shit work underwater. Whatever it takes.
I guessed Halliburton. Which made more sense.
James Cameron is a NASA advisor, experienced with underwater filming as others have stated, and by all accounts, a very smart guy. They could do worse.
I was under the impression that stopping the spill was a somewhat higher priority than getting good footage of it.
Or is he planning on having it stop by telling the special effects crew “Cut!”
Clearly, he plans to deploy the Na’vi against British Petroleum.
I think Avatar is a pretty cool guy, eh fights oil spills and doesn’t afraid of anything.
Wouldn’t it be helpful in stopping the spillage to have a good view of what is really going on down there instead of guessing or using not as clear images?
That’s my thought at least.
And it isn’t like he is the only guy they are consulting with. The blurb says that he was one of a group of 20 some scientists and other experts that met.
Could be worse, it could have been Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay…
…Get the oil spill to go all 'splodey and such.
Indeed- they’re well connected in the underworld.
Did you read that article? He’s bringing Stephen Baldwin into this. The man is his own oil spill.
Plus, just the knowledge of how to get valuable and possibly delicate equipment into very deep water would be useful in this situation.
Guys who actually work on underwater wells like this would have more experience in extreme depth ROV’s and video in their little toes than Cameron would have in his entire body. The idea that some film director who once made a movie designed to look like some of it was filmed at depth has more experience and knowledge than the guys who actually do this stuff week in week out is laughable. This is a publicity move, pure and simple.
Why? It would be a terrible publicity move.
It is more likely that the 20 people that got called in were called in not for their own personal knowledge, but for the network of knowledge they bring. These guys aren’t sitting around a table brainstorming up ideas. Instead they got briefed and then went off to coordinate with their own network of experts. It is likely that Cameron has worked with a lot of the deep-water experts you mentioned.
Whether Cameron is a good guy to call in, I have no idea. But it is not beyond the realm of possibility that he knows a lot of experts, can communicate with them, and can coordinate a large-scale endeavor.
He (or his people) did a lot of shooting at the real world wreck of the Titanic, which IIRC was 12 thousand feet down. And he may know a whole lot more about elements of underwater image technology, like lighting for example, than anyone at BP or the Coast Guard.
I’m not saying this as a fact, but it’s not completely off the wall. Hopefully, if he CAN’T be of help, he’ll say so fast and get out of the way. I haven’t heard of him being among the rather large group of Hollywood ignoramus activists who pop up to peddle themselves and their positions.
I thought it would be Halliburton, too, but that would be something like paying someone to close the barn door after the horse escapes when they were the ones that left the door open in the first place.