BUSAN: Oscar-winning film director James Cameron said Thursday the long-awaited sequel to his 2009 sci-fi blockbuster “Avatar” was made to be watched on big screens to create a fully immersive experience for audiences.
Ahead of its official release on Dec 16, 18 minutes of footage of “Avatar: The Way of Water” was shown to media at a 3D theater in Busan, where the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) has been under way since Wednesday, according to Yonhap news agency.
Avatar is touted as a breakthrough in terms of its filmmaking technology and still remains the highest-grossing film of all time worldwide.
Meant to be seen with 3D glasses on, the short video clip is a visual feast with compelling, vivid scenes of underwater exploration, which was shot with specialised cameras with a high-frame rate, it added.
Cameron said advanced technology was needed to make water scenes more real and lucid, which can be best visualized when screened at digital theaters, such as IMAX 3D, 4D and Dolby Cinemas.
“It’s just a fundamentally different experience,“ Yonhap reported Cameron, who virtually joined a press conference following its screening, said. “It creates a kind of hyper realism in scenes that are more mundane, more normal, and sometimes we need that cinematic experience.”
The Canada-born director said he picked water for the second Avatar story’s setting despite technological challenges because of his love for ocean and its creatures.
“That’s really just about my own love and joy in the oceans as a scuba diver, as an explorer and so on,“ he said.
Jon Landau, the co-producer, said the upcoming film is the first of four planned Avatar films and the ambition “to do it right” in designing the big project took time to introduce the sequel.
Landau said his team decided to unveil the footage of the highly-anticipated film at BIFF to draw the attention of tech-savvy South Korean moviegoers and cinephiles who gathered at Asia’s largest film festival.
“We saw the Busan film festival as a great opportunity to introduce the world of Pandora to the Asian marketplace as a whole,“ it also reported Landau said of the sequel during the press conference.-Bernama
