Titanic director James Cameron has made some interesting statements about his achievements with his new film Avatar recently. He recently revealed at Microsoft Advance '08 that Avatar will be the first feature film to have realistic CGI characters,

“Avatar will make people truly experience something. One more layer of the suspension of disbelief will be removed. All the syn-thespians are photo-realistic. Now that we’ve achieved it, we discovered CG characters in 3D look more real than in 2D. Your brain is cued it’s a real thing not a picture and discounting part of image that makes it look fake,” said Cameron. “Avatar is the single most complex piece of filmmaking ever made. We have 1,600 shots for a 2.5 hour movie. It’s not with a single CGI character, like King Kong or Gollum. We have hundreds of photo-realistic CG characters.”

This has some people wondering if Cameron has achieved the seemingly impossible in overcoming the "Uncanny Valley". /film has a great little section about the "Uncanny Valley describing it as,

Uncanny Valley is basically a theory that “when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost, but not entirely, like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers.” Imagine a graph showing the progression of realism in computer generated characters. The “valley” in question is a dip in that proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness. The theory is that “if a entity is sufficiently non-humanlike, then the humanlike characteristics will tend to stand out and be noticed easily, generating empathy. On the other hand, if the entity is ‘almost human’, then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of strangeness’ in the human viewer.”



James Cameron also revealed at the event that Ubisoft will be releasing a 3D version of a game based on the movie, which will run on a standard XBox 360 - complete with 3D glasses! First-person shooters will become true first-person experiences, he said.

According to Hollywood Reporter, "After 'Avatar,' I want to do something a lot smaller," James Cameron told The Hollywood Reporter on Thursday.

A possible next project is The Dive, a true story about the romance between controversial Cuban free diver Francisco "Pipin" Ferreras and Frenchwoman Audrey Mestre. Under his guidance, Mestre became a free diver who broke several world records but died in 2002 while competing.

"It's a drama, a love story," Cameron said. "This will require underwater photography, which will look gorgeous in 3-D."

Read more of Cameron's quotes and his thoughts about drama and 3-D here!