Avatar

I had a movie date with my Waku last night and we decided to watch the Avatar in 3D.
Days before, it has been the talk of the town and as one of those gossipmongers, I was intrigued about the film. I was expecting a long movie that would make me wanna go home while inside the movie house but then I found myself enjoying not to miss a single event in the movie.

I was mesmerized about the film. It was so nice that I can somehow connect to the characters. The 3D animation seemed to add more impact on the totality of the movie.

Here are some trivia for us. I tried searching for it in the world wide web. :)

• A casting call was posted on the website of Mali Finn Casting in early December 2005 for the female lead. The casting call was erroneously reported to be for James Cameron's Battle Angel (2011). However, Battle Angel will be the second of the back-to-back Cameron projects with a likely 2013 release.
  
  
• Michael Biehn was considered for the role of Col. Quaritch. He met with James Cameron three times and saw some of the 3D footage, but in the end it simply came down to the fact that Cameron didn't want people thinking it was Aliens (1986) all over again, as Sigourney Weaver had already been cast.
  
  
• Sigourney Weaver plays a James Cameron persona for her character in this film. Sigourney stated in an interview, "I teased him because to me I'm playing Jim Cameron in the movie as this kind of brilliant, approach-driven, idealistic perfectionist. But that same somebody has a great heart underneath. So I have to say I was always kind of channeling him."
  
  
• James Cameron originally attempted to get this film made in 1999 as his immediate follow-up to Titanic (1997). However, at the time, the special effects he wanted for the movie ran the proposed budget up to $400 million. No studio would fund the film, and it was subsequently shelved for almost ten years.
  
  
• The movie is 40% live action and 60% photo-realistic CGI. A lot of motion capture technology was used for the CGI scenes.
  
  
• Seeing the character of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) convinced James Cameron that CGI effects had progressed enough to make this film.
  
  
• Promotional items were shipped to cinemas under the name "Project 880".
  
  
• The film was shipped in two parts in the UK, first part was reels 1-5 and reels 6-10 came the following day. It was shipped under the codename "Redbird".
  
  
• To help the actors prepare for their roles, director James Cameron took the cast and crew to Hawaii, where they spent their days trekking through the forests and jungles and living like tribes (building campfires, eating fish, etc), in order to get a better sense of what it would be like to live and move around in the jungle on Pandora, since there would not be any actual jungle sets to aid and guide the actors and crew. Zoe Saldana even dressed up as a warrior during these journeys, complete with an alien tail symbolic of the one her character has in the movie. These hikes were only done during the daytime, though; The cast and crew spent their nights at a Four Seasons hotel.
  
  
• As of December 2009, with an alleged budget of US $280,000,000 (estimated), this is one of the most expensive movies ever made.
  
  
• Sam Worthington appeared in Terminator Salvation (2009), the fourth Terminator movie. His appearance in this non-Terminator movie is notable as James Cameron directed The Terminator (1984), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), T2 3-D: Battle Across Time (1996) as well has having being a writer (creator of characters) on other Terminator franchise video-games and TV episodes.
  
  
• First time that Sigourney Weaver has appeared in James Cameron film since Aliens (1986), a gap of twenty-three years.
  
  
• Avatars have five fingers and toes on their hands and feet and eyebrows, whereas the Na'vi only have four and no eyebrows. The Avatars are also broader in the chest and arms, appearing more 'muscular'.
  
  
• In much of the movie, Sigourney Weaver's avatar is wearing a Stanford shirt. Weaver attended Stanford in the early 1970s.
  
  
• The spiral-shaped, retracting creatures that Jake encounters early in the film are giant versions of Christmas Tree Worms, a marine invertebrate which is commonly kept in reef aquariums.
  
  
• The Na'vi language was created entirely from scratch by linguist Paul R. Frommer, who was hired by James Cameron to construct a language that was easily pronounceable by the actors, but lacking any resemblance or influence from any single human language. Around 500 words were created.
  
  
• Though he is not credited in the film, several of the locations have been identified as looking remarkably similar to paintings by English surrealist Roger Dean, most notably his works "Floating Islands" and "Arches".
  
  
• The Thai version of movie translates the word "Marine" into "Navi". (The Thai word for Marine is actually "Na-vig-ga-yo-tin", but to make voice over synced, the translator shortened it to "Navi".) So in Thai, Jake Sully is a "Navi" who becomes a "Na'vi".
  
  
• Even though the year the movie takes place is never stated, scenes of Jake Sully recording his video log show that the year is 2154.
  
  
• The biggest opener in the USA for an original film, previously held by The Incredibles (2004).
  
  
• Only the second James Cameron film not to feature any of his "regulars" (Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton, Jenette Goldstein or Arnold Schwarzenegger) (the other being Piranha Part Two: The Spawning (1981)).
  
  
• The actors playing the Na'vi had cameras attached to their head so that they filmed close-ups of their faces. Dots painted on their faces allowed motion-capture software to record their facial expressions, providing a 'framework' from which the CG artists worked.
  
  
• "Unobtainium" is a humorous term used mainly in the aerospace industry to describe the perfect material for an application except for the fact that it either does not exist, is extremely expensive to make, or is required to violate the laws of physics. Its shorthand symbol is Uo.
  
  
• Director Trademark: [James Cameron] [feet] Close-up of Jake's feet when he moves them around in the soil; close-up of Col. Quaritch's feet in his first scene.
  
  
• In Korean, "Na'vi" is spelled like "nabi" - the Korean word for "butterfly".
  
  
• This film broke the record for the fastest film to reach the $1 billion mark in worldwide gross, taking only 17 days.
  
  
• When Sully reassures Mo'at (the shaman) that he is "empty", this may be a reference his status as a US Marine. The term "jarhead" is applied to Marines partly to imply that their heads are empty. This connotation is mentioned, for instance, in Jarhead (2005)
  
  
• Many, though not all, of the creature sounds used are actually recycled dinosaur sounds from the James Cameron film Jurassic Park (1993). The famous T-rex roar is used several times for the Thanator and several different sounds used originally for the velociraptors are used here for the Viperwolves as well as the Direhorses.
  
  
• First time that the two biggest special effects studios, WETA and ILM, worked on the same movie.
  
  
• First (and, as of 2010, only) science fiction feature film by James Cameron not involving or mentioning nuclear weapons.
  
  
• This is the fifth movie ever to break the US$1 billion dollar mark at the box-office - it did so in a record breaking 17 days.
  
  
• When Jake Sully is ready to choose a woman, Neytiri tells him about the women in the tribe, starting with "Ninat is a great singer". One of Israel's leading pop singers called Ninet.
  
  
• In the beginning of the movie when awakened from cryosleep, the passengers of the Venture Star are informed they have been asleep for five years and nine months. Given that Pandora is in the Alpha Centauri system (4.4 light years away), the theory of special relativity dictates that the ship's average velocity with respect to Pandora over the whole trip was about 61% of the speed of light (113,000 miles/second) and due to time dilation, during the voyage seven years and three months elapsed on Pandora.
  
  

SPOILER: According to the read out and his statement made during the last log entry, Jake's birthday is August 24. However, this may be that he believes in a "second-birth" as one of the Omaticaya, so it may not be his actual human birthday but merely the day when he lives again as one of the Na'vi.