Comic-Con ‘09: Avatar panel

For the true geeks among us, there could be no bigger event at Comic-Con than uber-director James Cameron showing up to promote his shrouded-in-secrecy new project, Avatar. Not a single frame of footage, not one rendering or piece of concept art has been shown from the film. Until today.

Cameron chose Comic-Con 2009 as the venue at which to unveil Avatar to the world, and he did not disappoint, delivering an in-depth preview of the film that stacked up at about 25 minutes of total footage! The film, which details a human war against an alien race set on their homeworld of Pandora, is rich with infinite details and the most photo-realistic CGI work I’ve ever seen. Even the main characters are largely rendered as CGI, but it is impeccably done — and it was shown in the 3D technology that Cameron himself helped to invent and perfect. It’s a staggering achievement, a bold new step into a new frontier for cinema.

I have the full panel for you below, along with a few pictures, but the biggest news came at the very end: Cameron announced that 15 minutes of Avatar will be shown in theaters, IMAX, and select 3D digital screens on August 21st entirely for free. He called it a new “social media” experiment, sort of a big-budget attempt at creating viral word-of-mouth. It’s being named “Avatar Day.” If what they show in those 15 minutes resembles the stuff we saw today, I’d advise you run to the nearest theater on 8/21 and see this for yourselves.

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