By Lee Hyo-won
Staff Reporter
Jon Landau, who produced James Cameron's ``Titanic'' 12 years ago, visited Seoul Thursday to promote ``Avatar,'' his latest collaboration with the director, a groundbreaking 3D venture.
``I'm really happy to be here. We really see Korea as an emerging film market,'' the 49-year-old told reporters about his first visit to Seoul. The producer will visit the 14th Pusan (Busan) International Film Festival today to speak about the filmmaking process of ``Avatar.''
The esteemed producer shared 30 minutes of footage from the film with reporters, including some never-before revealed scenes.
Set in the future, "Avatar" is about Jake, a former marine who travels to a distant planet, Pandora, where he discovers adventure, hope and even love as he becomes integrated with the Navis, an indigenous alien race.
Jake, paralyzed from the waist down, is able to travel only by using an ``Avatar'' program which allows him to ``walk'' again. Avatars are human-Navi hybrids that a human such as Jake can control with their mind.
The story was conceived by Cameron 14 years ago but existing CGI (computer generated imagery) technology was not sophisticated enough to depict the fantastic world of Pandora or the 3-meter tall, blue-skinned Navis and Avatars.
``We wanted to make the 21st-century version of prosthetics,'' Landau said.
Filming involved the use of ``e-motion performance capture,'' a newly-integrated technique for CGI-rendered characters. Instead of using ``motion capture,'' the conventional method of tracing an actor's movements and then reproducing it through CGI, ``Avatar'' cast members wore helmets with attached cameras and interacted with one another in real time. ``We photographed their performance and analyzed it frame by frame on an almost a pore by pore basis,'' he said.
But he emphasized that CGI is only a means and not an end.
``The 3D is not an excuse to make a movie, not about gags that come off the screen, but the cherry on top of an ice cream sundae, a window into a new world," he said.
``While a lot of the movie is realized using CGI technology, it was based on and driven by human technology,'' Landau noted, further explaining that the film is more akin to franchises such as ``Lord of the Rings'' and ``Pirates of the Caribbean,'' which feature digitally rendered characters like Gollum and Davy Jones, respectively.
Only 5 percent and 10 percent of theaters in Korea and the United States, respectively, offer 3D movie screenings. When asked about the marketability of the film, he said, ``There are 138 theaters in Korea. The marketability of this film is based on the story James Cameron wrote,'' he said, adding that he expects the majority of the audience will see ``Avatar'' in 2D.
``Ultimately Avatar is a story about the least likely of people becoming a hero, and it will remind us that each one of us has the potential to be a hero," he said.
``Avatar'' will also be developed into video games and toys. ``Our belief is that entertainment today goes beyond one medium," Landau said. The film's official partner Ubisoft is developing a video game based on the world of Pandora; Sony (PlayStation), Nintendo (Wii) and Microsoft (Xbox) will be releasing games in 3D and Matel will produce toys that employ a new technology called ``total emersion.''