Saturday, January 23, 2010

Avatar, The Movie

My first entry of 2010 is about a movie which I'd watched last year. Why? Being quite busy & stressful lately, I didn't have the time & energy for my blog. However, I just couldn't let that movie go without writing about it because that movie is AVATAR! And it's FREAKING AWESOME! Not writing a review here coz there are too many out there already & I'm not qualify to do so. What I wanted to put down are more for my own memory of my personal experience & insight of the movie. While watching the movie, I noticed a flaw, quite unnoticeable to many when I brought up the matter. There's this inconstancy in scale. Most obvious is the differences in scale of the human to the Na'vi. In some scenes when human & Na'vi(or the avatars) are together, the Na'vi look gigantic & in another scene, they seem smaller. I assumed it was due to the CGI rendering of certain sections of the movie were handled by different teams & they don't merged up too good in perspective of scale in the final production. Other than the scale issue, in my humble opinion, James Cameron had done an impressive job. Avatar is one of the best movies I'd ever watched so far.

Avatar

The human interlopers

The indigenous locals

And the quarrels between them



It seems strange(to the Asian culture/society) that as a female, I love sci-fi movies & had watched many. And to top off the strangeness, what I love most in many sci-fi movies are the hardwares featured. The machinery or what's known in Japanese anime, mecha. In Avatar case, it's the spaceship, the shuttles, the choppers & the fighting suits.

List of machinery:
ISV Venture Star ~ Interstellar transport using antimatter propulsion systems to enable interstellar travel. The ISV Venture Star is one of twelve similar ships travelling between the Sol and Alpha Centauri A systems, commissioned by the RDA as mineral carriers.
Valkyrie ~ A space shuttle-like transport which delivers cargo and passengers to the surface. It has VTOL capability by swiveling its fusion engines, and like the C-130 Hercules was adapted as a bomber to drop daisy cutter bombs out of the rear cargo ramp.
AMP(Armored Mobility Platform) suit MK-6 ~ A combat vehicle that is worn and controlled as a large "mech" motorized suit.
Samson ~ Ducted fan VTOL utility aircraft similar in appearance and role to the Vietnam-era UH-1 Huey or contemporary UH-60 Blackhawk.
Scorpion ~ Heavily armed gunship counterpart to Samson. Similar in role and appearance to the AH-64 Apache or Hind gunships.
Dragon Gunship ~ Large four-post ducted-fan VTOL heavily armed transport and gunship which can deliver AMP suits through drop doors.

ISV Venture Star, Valkyrie & AMP suits

Samson, Scorpion & Dragon Gunship



Other than the mecha, what caught my attention when the movie started was, Avatar is one of the very few sci-fi movies till date that featured a moon as habitable & Earth-like instead of the planet. Avatar offers truly beautiful breathtaking landscapes & the floating mountains are like OMG! WOW! Astonishing!

Beautiful Pandora

Captivating Landscapes

The Unbelievable Floating Mountains



Beside those, what really intrigued & awed me is the amazingly incredible flora & fauna, a hint of an alien ecosystem. I believe this is the first time it was done in a frictional movie. Come to think of Pandora life forms, I have a question, why is it that all Pandora animals have 6 limbs & yet the Na'vi have only 2 pairs? Can anyone answer that?

List of flora:
Helicoradian (Loreyu) ~ Carnivorous plant that has red spiral-leaves. The plants are up to 3-4m tall and, when touched, they curl and collapse into themselves instantly.
Obesus rotundus (Rumut) ~ A tree that looks like a puffball tree.
Pseudocycas altissima (Tsyorina’wll) ~ Plant that looks like a tall Earth cycad.
The Hometrees (Kelutrel) ~ Giant trees great enough to house hundreds of clan members. The trees are honeycombed with natural hollows and alcoves in which the Na'vi sleep, eat, weave, dance, and celebrate their connection to Eywa. Adult Hometrees are more than 150 meters tall, and roughly 30 meters in diameter.
The Tree of Souls (Ayvitrayä Ramunong) ~ A tree where the Na'vi are able to communicate with the biological network that exists throughout Pandora.
The Tree of Voices (Utral Aymokriyä) ~ The most important tree to the Na'vi after the Tree of Souls. It is smaller but its appearance is similar and it too is illuminated.
Woodsprites (Atokirina’) ~ Seeds of the "holy tree", appearing similar to airborne jellyfish.

Flora of Pandora

Weird Creatures



List of fauna:
Prolemuris Blue ~ Hexapod creatures based on Earth's lemurs.
Hexapede (Yerik) ~ Hexapod deerlike creatures.
Hammerhead Titanothere (Angtsìk or ’angtsìkä in Na'vi) ~ Large hexapod herbivore with a head shaped like a hammer.
Thanator (Palulukan) ~ A large hexapodal land predator.
Viperwolf (Nantang) ~ A hexapod nocturnal carnivore.
Mountain Banshee (Ikran in Na'vi) ~ Airborne predator who lives in mountainous territory on Pandora. Na'vi warriors attempt to bond with a Banshee, a dangerous and required rite of passage. A Banshee bonds to a Na'vi warrior for life.
Great Leonopteryx (Toruk) ~ An airborne predator native to Pandora.
Direhorse (Pa'li) ~ A bioluminescent hexapod equine-like animal.

Strange Critters

Freaky Beasties

Native Air & Land Transports



And in a sort of fan service after watching Avatar, Axel, a Flickr friend of mine decided to turn me into a Na'vi. The creations below were what came out of his freaky mind! =P
Fortunately he didn't do me in Pandorean Blue which would be horribly disastrous! LOL! xD
These pics of his, including an animated video of me, are featured here in appreciation of his fabulous works & in respect of his creative imagination. My sincere heartfelt thanks, my dear Otaku Axel!

Na'vi Hengbok! =P

My Avatar & Me

Love Yourself

6 Comments:

At Monday, January 25, 2010 6:06:00 PM, Blogger tokinglekkerding said...

hey babe! great blog on AVATAR. i'm gaga over the movie.
james cameron's work always get people addicted e.g. Titanic and for the fact that he wanted for the technology to advance to create what he envisioned, the movie deserves all the credits.

and to sum it off..
k‹ìy›‹ev›ame ulte Eywa nga=hu
(see you again and may Eywa be with you)

 
At Thursday, January 28, 2010 10:20:00 PM, Anonymous Intronrunner said...

I think you are off on the scale thing. When the Na'Vi were with the humans, they looked big. Every scene with the humans.

When they were by themselves, they they might have looked smaller, but that is because we had no scale of reference to use. Everything was big, animals, plants other NA'Vi. We normally subconsciously will use ourselves as reference for others when watching movies (example: Tom Crusie looks big on screen, but in reality he isn't) If they used plants that were to scale of the ones on planet earth, then the Na'Vi would apear bigger all the time as the walked be a earth scaled tree.

Also the fact that these are CG, means the Animators are using basically the same model template for the characters. What one animator uses, the other uses the same thing, only changes are the use of the "camera", being either up close or further away, which again we use our own reference to provide the scale for the characters.

 
At Thursday, January 28, 2010 10:37:00 PM, Blogger Nikita Hengbok said...

Reply to Intronrunner: Please read my texts properly. I DID NOT say that I'm comparing the scale of everything, just the scale BETWEEN human & Na'vi & nothing else.

 
At Sunday, January 31, 2010 12:48:00 AM, Anonymous JK said...

Oh no! Another one of those smart ass-farts!
Ever since Discovery Channel and Wikipedia they've been sprouting like mushrooms out of BS, which explains why their mouth stinks of BS every time it gapes.

Background details like vegetation are deliberately kept consistent to main characters whether as blue Zentradi or white human to prevent audiences from becoming disorientated. Mr. intro-n-runner would be one of those running to toilet to puke his guts out after the movie intro.

This Attenborough wannabe has no experience with CG, cameras or his god given eyes. Does he even know your album is filled with CG stuff? These srooms like to be kept in the dark and fed BS, all they do is assume, presume and consume!

 
At Monday, March 01, 2010 11:19:00 PM, Anonymous Intronrunner said...

Actually I did read it and the way it was read was as if the other scene was taking place without the humans and Na'Vi being together. I will aplogize for reading it wrong.

JK: There was no need for you to attack me in such a manner.

 
At Thursday, March 18, 2010 10:09:00 AM, Anonymous Frank said...

Me gusta tu estilo, eres una chica explendida!!

 

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