In defense of Avatar...

I'm posting this & the following reply as they both make excellent points! Thank you Mike! 

Michael Schaus said...

Done the week and now catching up on these…Sounds like avatar has been on your mind as much as mine Siobhan!

It seems like Cameron intentionally picked a predictable, played narrative in an attempt, (a successful one I think) to break new ground in how immersive you can get with 3D.

I think that no; we don’t ultimately want the 3D experiences to be driven by “played” narratives. There can be more and it’s very exciting to think of how to apply these findings to a smaller scale, more subtle character study. But then it brings up the question; Do I really want to see Black Robe:IMAX 3D? Not until I trust that the deeper immersion the technology provides won’t jar me out of a more complex narrative—and that the creator of the narrative understands how to make the story resonate with what's emerging as a new version of the medium.

Emotional depth from complex characters over a layered and relevant narrative…in 3D? It’s difficult to reconcile at this point. However, Avatar is certainly a more complex narrative than when I saw Michael Jackson in Captain EO at Disneyland in the 90’s, so I can see progress. ;)

The entire world was scrupulously drawn, I really felt transported and I found myself forgetting that it was CGI. That’s not a trivial accomplishment in the world of story telling. To be able to focus on the technology, Cameron seems to have intentionally (unobtainium?) isolated on the script side of the narrative equation, leveraging the redemption that’s historically included in this narrative tradition of the white colonizer’s dream of going native.

I heard Sigourney Weaver on Letterman saying that every frame of the Navi characters was representative of 40 man-hours of work from the Digital Domain effects house. In terms of attention allocated, it’s an immense amount. Every 24th of a second of film is an average working week. Was it a waste of time? Or did he make a world?

Say he did make the pieces of a new virtual world. The interesting question that comes up for me now, is what to do with that world. On the less budget intensive side of film, say independent documentary, the trend of re-purposing footage into new and creative packages to be re-released over the film’s life cycle, is expanding. At it's best, this trend is starting to yield more sustainable projects and richer themes as people interact with recreated pieces over time. What could be done to re-purpose and recreate the pieces of this film toward that ongoing interaction?

Not so much to make them any more money, (they’ve grossed over a billion dollars) but to take all that work, and to open the doors to Pandora, and let people interact with it. The idea is getting a little out there, but I’m imagining a new, alternative film-going experience where the movie was just a “trailer”/”describer”/”tuning fork” to what the values, beliefs, tone of that world is in a very (very) broad strokes kind of way. What’s oversimplified in the film experience could be increased in complexity via massive multiperson interaction. (One major difference is the independent documentary example is that there is a ongoing analog component screenings, meetups that co-mingles with what’s going on in the digital space.)

The ongoing attention to re-purposed pieces could iterate into something beyond the constraints of the original narrative—potentially into narrative lines on race, imperialism, and the environment that are less saccharine and violent.

…or you could end up playing gin rummy in a tree with a bunch of huge blue cat people just because it was awesome and you were between meetings..

Posted via web from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales