AVATAR

LL & JC

On December 16^th I watched Jim Cameron’s Avatar in the Mk2 cinema on the banks of the Seine at Porte de Bercy in the middle of the Bibliothèque Nationale complex.  A couple of hours before, Bernard Benoliel and Laurent Mannoni of the Cinémathèque Française, had picked me up at Charles de Gaulle Airport and we decided to see Avatar which opened in France two days before it’s opening here.  I was invited by the Cinémathèque to give a talk during their 3D film series of screenings. When I sat down to watch Avatar in the Mk2 theater, I must have had three hours of sleep in the previous 24 hours. I was beginning to go into a jet lag fugue, and watching Avatar under these conditions was like watching a dream world in a trance.  

LIVE-ACTION STEREOSCOPIC FEATURES

 

As reported in Daily Variety Jeffrey Katzenberg was recently heard decrying the lack of live-action stereoscopic features.  He exhorted the industry to correct this situation.  He was also quoted as musing about his motivation for going beyond the mandate of his own particular self interest, animation, by taking on the live-action cause.  But if there were more live action stereoscopic features in the theaters it will also be good for people who make feature-length animated films, like Katezenberg. 

Reality and Illusion

To paraphrase Einstein:  Space is what keeps everything from happening at the same place, and stereoscopic imaging helps us visualize space.  The concept of space, or distance, is so fundamental, that a tentative understanding of our perception of it has taken the human race centuries. Stereoscopic imaging heightens our perception of space and it is so fundamental to our existence that any idea that the stereoscopic cinema is a passing fad is ridiculous.

Around the Block with Coraline

This is a story about an independent filmmaker who wants to make 3-D movies, who meets a guy from an animation studio that, many years later, gets sold and turned into another studio, and it’s a story about a guy who directs a 3-D rock video for the filmmaker, who years later asks for help in making a 3D feature, and now we’ve got Coraline in 3-D.  The story begins in 1974 and end in 2009. This is a story about how I helped Henry Selick, the director of Coraline, and his director of cinematography, Pete Kozachik.  The story starts before I met Henry, in 1974 when I was an independent filmmaker and attended a filmmaker’s conference near Tampa.  There I met the head animator at Will Vinton Studios.  Will Vinton is famous for his claymation ad of those dancing raisins, to the tune “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”