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James Cameron’s Avatar has crossed the $1 billion mark at the worldwide box office in just 17 days, surpassing Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight to become #4 of all time. By the end of the week, the film is expected to surpass Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King to become the #2 worldwide release of all time. Of course, for now, Cameron’s Titanic remains seated at #1. James Cameron has become the first director to have two films earn $1 Billion. And by the end of the week, it should be up to $3 billion total between the two movies.

Cameron’s sci-fi epic made an estimated $68.3 million in the States during it’s third weekend out, destroying the previous record of $45 million set by Spider-Man 3. Looks like this baby has legs. If that wasn’t enough, Avatar is also setting records in Janaury: This weekend’s box office total of $68.3 million will be almost $30 million larger than the all-time record January opening weekend.

And what about yearly records? Transformers Revenge of the Fallen took 114 days to hit $402 million, becoming the highest grossing film of 2009 domestically. Avatar will surpass that figure in an estimated 20 days.

James Cameron, the film director who pushed technical effects to the limit with the blockbuster Titanic in 1997, and ushered in the dawn of action films with ‘80s classics such as Terminator and Aliens, has unleashed the film he has been hoping to make for nearly 20 years.

It’s not the first time cinema has flirted with 3D - Alfred Hitchcock even experimented with the technology when he filmed Dial M for Murder in the 1950s. But the results have often been derided, either for hokey effects or poor stories, with Spy Kids 3D and Journey to the Centre of the Earth both getting a lukewarm reception.

However the $237m budget of Avatar signals a leap in technology - indeed, Cameron waited 15 years before starting filming as technology had not advanced enough to portray his vision. Tired of waiting for technology to catch up, he co-developed a new generation of stereoscopic cameras. Simplified, this is the equivalent of two cameras strapped together, each providing a slightly different perspective on the scene, mimicking the way human eyes view the world in three dimensions.
This changes the ballpark of moving images.

If you’ve had previous experience of 3D, your impression will probably be one of a flattish image with the occasional object ‘flying’ at you’.

But these advances are different - the entire screen has depth, taking on the appearance of a window through which the viewer is watching a ‘world’ on the screen, with a distinct foreground and background, rather than a flat, moving painting
In effect, the cinema screen becomes a theatre stage.

There’s still at least one throw-back to the ‘early days’ of 3D - viewers will need to wear glasses to get the illusion.
However these are not the red and green cardboard cut-outs you used to get free with Sugar Puffs before Comic Relief.
These are polarising glasses, untinted, which do not cause the headaches experienced in the past, or more importantly rely on frequent ‘pans’ of the camera to make the image appear in 3D.
Each lens has a different filter , which removes different part of the image as it enters each eye. This gives the brain the illusion it is seeing the picture from two different angles, creating the 3D effect.

Continuing to develop new technology as he went along, Cameron also devised a ‘virtual camera’, a hand-held monitor that allowed him to move through a 3D terrain. This, Cameron said, allowed him to create ‘the ultimate immersive media’, which he anticipates will exceed any and all expectation. In essence, this allowed Cameron to direct the film as if it was computer game. If he wanted to change the viewpoint, he could click a few buttons on a mouse and a computer would redraw the virtual world from the new perspective.
Cameron tweaked his cameras through two 3-D documentaries he made for IMAX theaters, “Ghosts of the Abyss” (2003) and “Aliens of the Deep” (2005).

In some of the “Avatar” footage released at Comic-Con, humans filmed with his 3-D camera rig are mixed with the computer-generated images of the movie’s avatars — beings created with mixed human and alien DNA.

Cameron said he wanted to have the filmmaking techniques fade into the background as the story took over.

“The ideal movie technology is so advanced that it waves a magic wand and makes itself disappear,” he said.

Cameron himself was behind the lens in many scenes that were framed using a “virtual camera” — a handheld monitor that lets the director walk through the computer-enhanced 3-D scene and record it as if he were the cameraman. The effect on screen is a “shaky cam” effect that makes action sequences seem up close and sometimes focuses the audience’s gaze at something in particular.

“It allows Jim to approach this process with the same sensibilities that he would have approached live-action filming,” said producer Jon Landau. The ability to capture human emotions in computerized 3-D has also advanced. Unlike past methods that captured dots placed on human faces to trace movements that are reconstructed digitally, now each frame is analyzed for facial details such as pores and wrinkles that help re-create a moving computerized image.

“It’s all going to advance the whole concept of 3-D one leap higher,” said Marty Shindler, a filmmaking consultant with The Shindler Perspective Inc.

Yet even with four years of preparation and the attention surrounding “Avatar,” there will not be enough U.S. screens adapted to the technology for a full wide release only in 3-D.

Of the 38,800 movie screens in the U.S., about 2,500 are capable of showing digital 3-D movies. Theater chains have been adding about 90 to 100 per month this year, but they’re still short of the 4,000-plus screens that have been used for major event movies.

With the conversion costing $100,000 a pop, theater owners are wary of moving too quickly, said Patrick Corcoran, director of media and research for the National Association of Theatre Owners.

“The successes of ‘Monsters vs. Aliens’ and ‘Ice Age (Dawn of the Dinosaurs) in 3-D’ aside, this is still really early days for this format,” he said.

Studios are pushing theater owners to convert more screens, partly because people pay about $2 more per ticket and cram theaters for 3-D releases. Revenue per screen is up to three times higher than for the same movie’s 2-D version.

Walt Disney Co.’s chief executive, Bob Iger, said this week that his studio has 17 3-D films in development, including “A Christmas Carol.” That movie, directed by Robert Zemeckis, adopted many of the same performance-capture techniques used in “Avatar” but comes out a month earlier, in November.

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