Industry practitioner – James Cameron

I’m a huge fan of James Cameron and was first introduced to his work when I watched Aliens for the first time. To this day that film is on my list as top favourites including Terminator 1 and 2, and when watching them as a kid, I then started getting into the science fiction scene.
In my opinion James Cameron has more drive for the money than he does for the visual arts and the artistic aspects of creating film, in the past decade digital technology has matured more and I see James Cameron as not a film maker, but more of an innovator, a man that creates new techniques and technologies whenever he starts a new film project, he’s always trying to push the boundary and take it to a whole new level. Avatar would be a good example of what I am trying to explain, Avatar, in my opinion isn’t a brilliant film, when I hear people talk about it they speak more of the visual aspect of the film, the special effects, the computer generated images etc. And they rave on about how fantastic these effects and graphics are, but what about the story of the film? Really, all Avatar is about is re-locaiton and the exploitation of innocent people, but again thats one thing that bugs me, when i watch a film I don’t just consume the visual effects in front of me, I watch the film for the story.
Although bent on money making James Cameron maybe, he is always trying to push the boundaries of film making, always trying to see what is possible with new technologies so the reason he keeps recycling his scripts, it maybe for that reason.

On the topic of Avatar. I may of mentioned that I didn’t admire the story, though this is true, I have full respect and admiration to the production of the film. Since the release of Titanic, Cameron sought of disappeared from the scene a little bit, though during his approximate 12 year break he was working on many projects, one of them being the 3D fusion camera system, a system designed to imitate the vision of the human eye, a system he would use in the production of Avatar. I find it so interesting that when the film was just an imagination in Cameron’s mind, the equipment and the technology to create such visual effects just didn’t exist in that time, so the whole process of constructing and visualising how this film was going to look took over 10 years.