Titanic Director Plans 3-D Film
Source: Wired
James Cameron, whose technological wizardry helped make Titanic the highest-grossing film in history, is convinced celluloid is on its way out. And to help send it to its grave, the director says he will start production early next year on one of the most ambitious movies ever made: a high-definition, 3-D digital feature.
The topic of his planned movie is a secret. Some Cameron watchers speculate that it might be his long-planned epic about the first manned trip to Mars. But Cameron is making no secret of his belief that the movie-going public is now ready for the biggest transformation in the movie business since talkies were invented.
"I think (the movie) is going to be huge, and it's going to be a huge enabler for the 3-D experience," he said in a brief interview earlier this month at the Large Format Cinema Association conference and festival, devoted to works for Imax theaters and other super-sized movie screens.
Cameron said he thinks the technology he developed for Ghosts of the Abyss -- his just-released 3-D Imax documentary about his voyage 12,500 feet below the ocean to the wreckage of the Titanic -- is advanced enough to power an entire feature film.
He used new lightweight, high-capacity, high-resolution cameras to shoot Ghosts. These are "light years" ahead of cameras used for his only other 3-D project, the T2 3-D ride at Universal Studios, he said.
The movie won't come cheap. Ghosts cost $12.5 million for a one-hour documentary that had only one actor (Bill Paxton), modest special effects and a simple plot. Considering Titanic cost $200 million or more to make, an epic high-def, 3-D film easily could run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The film will be the fruit of Cameron's conviction that the benefits of digital cinema -- easily manipulated high-resolution images, the ability to view footage instantly, hard-drive-stored data that never degrades and, ultimately, the disappearance of expensive film stock -- soon will make it a more desirable medium than celluloid.
