There are a few things you can probably expect from James Cameron‘s brewing trifecta of "Avatar" sequels. More Sam Worthington, a return to Pandora, and more eye-popping visual effects. But just how dazzling will his movies be? Well, Cameron is never one to mince words.
“I can tell you one thing about them, they’re gonna be bitchin’. You will shit yourself with your mouth wide open,” he told Empire. Indeed, the filmmaker is always eager to push the latest new fangled technology to try and wow moviegoers, and he’s not backing away from the frame-rate debate, promising the next films will double the standard 24fps.
"My thinking at the time was that 60 [FPS] might be a better segue to the video market,” he said of earlier attempts to increase frame rate. “I’ll be plugging into a system that’s a little more mature, so it makes sense for me to do 48 frames at this point.” And while it remains to be seen what gee-whiz effects Cameron will bring out for the follow-up films, the production process has now found VFX personnel brought into the screenwriting fold.
”It was very revolutionary this time in terms of the way in which virtual production and performance capture were integrated into a new production system. So, it’s really more of what the viewer will experience in terms of the world, new cultures, new creatures new environments – that sort of thing,” Cameron said during a Wall Street Journal conference (via International Business Times). “We have to have a world that continues to refresh itself and be rich and unexpected.”
And shooting the movie itself is unlike the way you might think of a normal film production. “Interestingly, the term ‘filming’ is so obsolete in almost every regard because we do some image capture where there’s actual photograph, but it’s done entirely on digital cameras,” he said (via THR). “And that only represents a small part, maybe 20 to 25 percent, of the total film. The rest is completely synthetically generated.”
Will it be enough to make us shit overselves, though? We’ll find out when the first "Avatar" sequel arrives in 2017.