How James Cameron's Innovative New 3D Techniques Created

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1…What is Innovation?

Innovation is the development of new values through solutions that meet new

requirements, inarticulate needs, or old customer and market needs in value adding

new ways.

This is accomplished through more effective products, processes, service,

technologies or ideas that are readily available to markets, governments and the

society.

Innovation differs from invention in that innovation refers to the use of a better and,

as a result, novel idea or method, whereas invention refers more directly to the

creation of the idea or method itself.

Innovation differs from improvement in that innovation refers to the notion of doing

something different rather than doing the same thing better.

The famous robotics engineer Joseph F. Engelberger asserts that innovations require

only three things:

1. A recognized need,

2. Competent people with relevant technology, and

3. Financial support.

In this assignment I mentioned two type of innovation.

How James Cameron's Innovative New 3D Techniques Created

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2…Incremental Innovation

A series of small improvements to an existing product or product line that usually

helps maintain or improve its competitive position over time. Incremental innovation

is regularly used within the high technology business by companies that need to

continue to improve their products to include new features increasingly desired

by consumers

Incremental innovation (sometimes referred to as sustaining innovation) uses existing

forms or technologies as a starting point.

"Gillette used to make razors with a single blade. Later, one of its diligent students of

stubble asked, Wouldn‘t two blades be better than one? Thus was born the Trac

II. Next came – guess what? – a razor with three blades – the Mach III. I love Gillette

razors – use one every morning."

Other good examples include the,

Apple iPod. The original iPod came in just white, and enabled you to store and play

your mp3 music collection only. Incremental improvements have occurred over time

so that today you can buy them in many different colours; store your family

photographs and even your video collection.

Global Positioning Satellite. These are now common place in motor vehicles to

assist drivers in getting from A to B. GPS systems in cars are an example of an

incremental innovation in which something that already exists has just been

reconfigured to another use.

Intel Pentium Processors. Intel introduced the Pentium 4 computer processor chip as

an incremental improvement to the Pentium 3 chip. Both chips had the same basic

technology but the Pentium 4 introduced new design improvements and additional

features to improve the chips overall performance.

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Motor vehicles. The cars of twenty or thirty years back and beyond could be thought

of as quite basic when compared to the cars of today. Incremental improvements have

occurred over time so that its common to expect a modern day car to include electric

windows, ABS breaks, air bags, cup holders and the list goes on.

Making incremental improvements is important for extending the marketable life of a

product or service.

How James Cameron's Innovative New 3D Techniques Created

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3…Disruptive Innovation

A disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value

network , and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network

(over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology.

The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that

improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first

by designing for a different set of consumers in the new market and later by lowering

prices in the existing market.

I would like to share some examples:

Digital photography: Early digital cameras suffered from low picture quality and

resolution and long shutter lag. Quality and resolution are no longer major issues and

shutter lag is much less than it used to be. The convenience of small memory cards

and portable hard drives that hold hundreds or thousands of pictures, as well as the

lack of the need to develop these pictures, also helped. Digital cameras have a high

power consumption (but several lightweight battery packs can provide enough power

for thousands of pictures). Cameras for classic photography are stand-alone

devices. In the same manner, high-resolution digital video recording has replaced film

stock, except for high-budget motion pictures.

Downloadable Digital media: In the 1990s, the music industry phased out

the single , leaving consumers with no means to purchase individual songs. This

market was initially filled by illegal peer-to-peer file sharing technologies, and then

by online retailers such as the iTunes Store and Amazon.com. This low end disruption

eventually undermined the sales of physical, high-cost CDs.

Desktop publishing: Early desktop-publishing systems could not match high-end

professional systems in either features or quality. Nevertheless, they lowered the cost

of entry to the publishing business, and economies of scale eventually enabled them to

match, and then surpass, the functionality of the older dedicated publishing systems.

How James Cameron's Innovative New 3D Techniques Created

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Computer printers: Offset printing has a high overhead cost , but very low unit cost

compared to computer printers, and superior quality. But as printers, especially laser

printers, have improved in speed and quality, they have become increasingly useful

for creating documents in limited issues.

High speed CMOS video sensors: When first introduced, high speed CMOS sensors

were less sensitive, had lower resolution, and cameras based on them had less

duration (record time). The advantage of rapid setup time, editing in the camera, and

nearly-instantaneous review quickly eliminated 16 mm high speed film systems.

CMOS-based cameras also require less power (single phase 110 V AC and a few

amps for CMOS, vs. 240 V single- or three-phase at 20-50 A for film

cameras). Continuing advances have overtaken 35 mm film and are challenging

70 mm film applications.

In this assignment I did not mention any product or service innovation, but it is related

to Entertainment Industry and one of the great entrepreneurial efforts in Film industry.

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4…Is a movie an innovation?

Each film is an entrepreneurial venture, a financial and personal risk that filmmakers

take and often sacrifice years of their lives for. As the audience, we enjoy to immerse

in ever-new stories and characters to touches our minds and emotions.

However, is a movie really an innovation? One can argue.

The generic definition of innovation…

“innovation is different from a novelty: it is the combination that translates a novelty

into a marketable product (or service), so an innovation brings together the newness,

the value it creates and the adoption to something marketable”.

Therefore, also a movie would have to demonstrate these same three requirements in

order to be innovative.

1. Novelty

2. Creating a value

3. Capturing value in a marketplace.

Yes, I am talking about the one of the highest budget movie of Hollywood….

This movie has broken almost all the records of Film industry. This movie was

released in 2009 and become highest grossing film ever.

This film was released in to 2D, 3D and 4D (in some selected theatres of South

Korea) format in all over the world and….

Name of the movie is AVATAR….!!!

The innovations in this movie lie between two kinds of research: Incremental and

Disruptive.

So, it is necessary to know about the movie and innovations of Director.

How James Cameron's Innovative New 3D Techniques Created

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5…“AVATAR”

Avatar is a 2009 American epic science fiction film written and directed by James

Cameron, and starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Michelle

Rodriguez, Joel David Moore, Giovanni Ribisi and Sigourney Weaver. The film is set

in the mid-22nd century, when humans are mining a precious mineral

called unobtanium on Pandora, a lush habitable moon of a gas giant in the Alpha

Centauri star system. The expansion of the mining colony threatens the continued

existence of a local tribe of Na'vi – a humanoid species indigenous to Pandora. The

film's title refers to a genetically engineered Na'vi body with the mind of a remotely

located human, and is used to interact with the natives of Pandora.

Development of Avatar began in 1994, when Cameron wrote an 80-page treatment for

the film. Filming was supposed to take place after the completion of Cameron's 1997

film Titanic, for a planned release in 1999, but according to Cameron, the necessary

technology was not yet available to achieve his vision of the film. Work on the

language of the film's extraterrestrial beings began in summer 2005, and Cameron

began developing the screenplay and fictional universe in early 2006. Avatar was

officially budgeted at $237 million. Other estimates put the cost between $280 million

and $310 million for production and at $150 million for promotion. The film made

extensive use of cutting edge motion capture filming techniques, and was released for

traditional viewing, 3D viewing (using the RealD 3D, Dolby 3D, XpanD 3D,

and IMAX 3D formats), and for "4D" experiences in select South Korean

theaters. The stereoscopic film making was touted as a breakthrough in cinematic

technology.

Avatar premiered in London on December 10, 2009, and was internationally released

on December 16 and in the United States and Canada on December 18, to positive

critical reviews, with critics highly praising its groundbreaking visual effects. During

its theatrical run, the film broke several box office records and became the highest-

grossing film of all time, as well as in the United States and Canada,

surpassing Titanic, which had held those records for twelve years. It also became the

first film to gross more than $2 billion. Avatar was nominated for nine Academy

Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won three, for Best Art

How James Cameron's Innovative New 3D Techniques Created

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Direction, Best Cinematography and Best Visual Effects. The film's home media

release went on to break opening sales records and became the top-sellingBlu-ray of

all time. Following the film's success, Cameron signed with 20th Century Fox to

produce two sequels, making Avatar the first of a planned trilogy.

It is brief story of Avatar. Now some questions may be raised in mind like,

1. How the idea was generated in the mind of Director?

2. How the idea was grown and implemented?

3. How the development was carried out?

4. What are the stages of development?

5. What are the themes and inspiration of movie?

6. Was Avatar Disruptive Innovation or Incremental Innovation?

7. How the innovator (Here, Director) manage the Innovation risk?

8. How the innovator linked with the innovation?

9. What are the effects of innovation in Industry with respect to Porter‘s five

force model?

10. Who is the behind of success?

You can find answer of these questions in this assignment.

How James Cameron's Innovative New 3D Techniques Created

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6…Origin of Idea:

In 1994, director James Cameron wrote an 80-page treatment for Avatar, drawing

inspiration from "every single science fiction book" he had read in his childhood as

well as from adventure novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider

Haggard. In August 1996,

Cameron announced that after completing Titanic, he would film Avatar, which

would make use of synthetic, or computer-generated, actors. The project would cost

$100 million and involve at least six actors in leading roles "who appear to be real but

do not exist in the physical world".

Visual effects house Digital Domain, with whom Cameron has a partnership, joined

the project, which was supposed to begin production in the summer of 1997 for a

1999 release. However, Cameron felt that the technology had not caught up with the

story and vision that he intended to tell.

He decided to concentrate on making documentaries and refining the technology for

the next few years. It was revealed in a Bloomberg Business Week cover story that

20th Century Fox had fronted $10 million to Cameron to film a proof-of-concept clip

for Avatar, which he showed to Fox executives in October 2005.

In February 2006, Cameron revealed that his film Project 880 was "a retooled version

of Avatar", a film that he had tried to make years earlier, citing the technological

advances in the creation of the computer-generated characters Gollum, King Kong,

and Davy Jones.

Cameron had chosen Avatar over his project Battle Angel after

completing a five-day camera test in the previous year.

The 280,000-square-foot studio in Playa Vista, Calif., has a curious history as a

launching pad for big, risky ideas. In the 1940s, Howard Hughes used the huge

wooden airplane hangar to construct the massive plywood H-4 Hercules seaplane—

famously known as the Spruce Goose. Five years ago, movie director James Cameron

was in the Playa Vista studio at a crucial stage in his own big, risky project. He was

viewing early footage from Avatar, the sci-fi epic he had been dreaming about since

his early 20s. Cameron's studio partner, Twentieth Century Fox, had already

committed to a budget of $200 million (the final cost is reportedly closer to $300

million) on what promised to be the most technologically advanced work of cinema

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ever undertaken. But as Cameron looked into his computer monitor, he knew

something had gone terribly wrong. .

The film—although "film" seems to be an anachronistic term for such a digitally

intense production—takes place on a moon called Pandora, which circles a distant

planet. Jake Sully, a former Marine paralyzed from the waist down during battle on

Earth, has traveled to this lush, green world teeming with exotic, bioluminescent life

to take part in the military's Avatar program.The human settlers are interested in

mining Pandora's resources but can't breathe its toxic atmosphere, so to help explore

the moon and meet with the native Na'vi who live there, Sully has his consciousness

linked with a genetically engineered 9-foot-tall human–alien hybrid.

Cameron wrote his first treatment for the movie in 1995 with the intention of pushing

the boundaries of what was possible with cinematic digital effects. In his view,

making Avatar would require blending live-action sequences and digitally captured

performances in a three-dimensional, computer-generated world. Part action–

adventure, part interstellar love story, the project was so ambitious that it took 10

more years before Cameron felt cinema technology had advanced to the point where

Avatar was even possible.

The scene on Cameron's screen at Playa Vista—an important turning point in the

movie's plot—showed Na'vi princess Neytiri, played by Zoë Saldana, as she first

encounters Sully's Avatar in the jungles of Pandora. Everything in the forest is

luminous. Glowing sprites float through Pandora's atmosphere, landing on Sully as

Neytiri determines if he can be trusted. Playing Sully is Sam Worthington, an

Australian actor whom Cameron had plucked from obscurity to play the movie's

hero. Cameron was staring directly into Worthington's face—or, rather, he was

looking into the face of a digitally rendered Worthington as a creature with blue skin

and large yellow eyes—but he might as well have been staring into a Kabuki mask.

The onscreen rendering of Worthington was supposed to be a sort of digital sleight of

hand—a human character inhabiting an alien body so that he could blend into an alien

world, played by a human actor inhabiting a digital body in a digital world. To make

How James Cameron's Innovative New 3D Techniques Created

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the whole thing work, Worthington's performance, those subtle expressions that sell a

character to the audience, had to come through the face of his Avatar. But after

millions of dollars of research and development, the Avatar's face was not only

lifeless, it was downright creepy. It "scared the crap out of me," Cameron recalls.

"Horrible! It was dead, it was awful, it wasn't Sam. God, I thought. We've done

everything right and this is what It looks like?”

The reaction Cameron was feeling has a name. It's called the uncanny valley, and it's a

problem for roboticists and animators alike. Audiences are especially sensitive to

renderings of the human face, and the closer a digital creation gets to a photorealistic

human, the higher expectations get.

If you map human movements and expression to cute furry creatures that dance and

sing like people, then audiences willingly suspend disbelief and go along with

it.(Think of the penguins in Happy Feet.) But if you try to give a digital character a

humanoid face, anything short of perfection can be uncanny—thus the

term. Sometimes audience unease is to a character's advantage; in The Lord of the

Rings the creature Gollum was supposed to be unsettling. But Cameron was looking

for empathy, and in the first footage, that's not what he got.

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7…Idea behind computer-generated face of a blue, cat-eyed human–

alien hybrid:

Well, for one thing, lots of money is riding on it. But so, to an extent, is James

Cameron's stature as an unstoppable force in Hollywood. Cameron has built up

enormous fame and power based on his reputation as a technical innovator—pushing

the science and technology of modelmaking, digital animation and camera

engineering. But Cameron is perhaps even more famous as the industry's biggest risk-

taker, which might have made him a lot of enemies if his risks hadn't been so

spectacularly rewarded in the past. In 1997, the film Titanic taught Hollywood a

powerful lesson in Cameronomics: The director's unquenchable thirst for authenticity

and technological perfection required deep-sea exploratory filming, expensive scale

models and pioneering computer graphics that ballooned the film's budget to $200

million. This upped the ante for everyone involved and frightened the heck out of the

studio bean counters, but the bet paid off—Titanic went on to make $1.8 billion

andwin 11 Academy Awards.

A unique hybrid of scientist, explorer, inventor and artist, Cameron has made testing

the limits of what is possible part of his standard operating procedure. He dreams

almost impossibly big, and then invents ways to bring those dreams into reality. The

technology of moviemaking is a personal mission to him, inextricably linked with the

art. Each new film is an opportunity to advance the science of cinema, and

if Avatar succeeds, it will change the way movies are captured, edited and even

acted.

Filmmakers, especially those with a technical bent, admire Cameron for "his

willingness to incorporate new technologies in his films without waiting for them to

be perfected," says Bruce Davis, the executive director of the Academy of Motion

Picture Arts and Sciences. It adds to the risky nature of Cameron's projects, but his

storytelling has reaped enormous benefits. There's a term in Hollywood for Cameron's

style of directing, Davis says: "They call this ‗building the parachute on the way

down.'"

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But repeatedly pulling off these feats of derring-do requires both the drive of an

ambitious egomaniac and an engineer's plodding patience. "You have to eat pressure

for breakfast if you are going to do this job," Cameron says. "On the one hand,

pressure is a good thing. It makes you think about what you're doing, your

audience. You're not making a personal statement, like a novel. But you can't make a

movie for everybody—that's the kiss of death. You have to make it for yourself."

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8…Idea behind the GONZO effects:

Cameron's dual-sided personality has roots in his upbringing—the brainy sci-fi geek

from Chippewa, Ontario, was raised by a painter mother and an engineer father. "It

was always a parallel push between art and technology," he says. "My approach to

filmmaking was always very technical. I started off imagining not that I would be a

director, but a special effects practitioner.”

Unable to afford to go to film school in Los Angeles, Cameron supported himself as a

truck driver and studied visual effects on weekends at the University of Southern

California library, photocopying dissertations on optical printing and the sensitometry

of film stocks. "This is not bull," he says. "I gave myself a great course on film FX for

the cost of the copying.”

Cameron eventually landed a job on the effects crew of Roger Corman's low-budget

1980 filmBattle Beyond the Stars, but he didn't tell anyone that he was an autodidact

with no practical experience. When he was exposed to the reality of film production,

it was very different from what he had imagined, he recalls: "It was totally gonzo

problem solving. What do you do when Plans A, B and C have all crashed and burned

by 9 am? That was my start. It wasn't as a creative filmmaker—it was as a tech

dude."

Over the years, Cameron's budgets have increased to become the biggest in the

business, and digital technology has changed the realm of the possible in Hollywood,

but Cameron is still very much the gonzo engineer.

He helped found the special-effects company Digital Domain in the early 1990s, and

he surrounds himself with Hollywood inventors such as Vince Pace, who developed

special underwater lighting for Cameron's 1989 undersea sci-fi thriller, The

Abyss.Pace also worked with Cameron on Ghosts of the Abyss, a 2003 undersea 3D

documentary that explored the wreck of the Titanic. For that movie, Pace and

Cameron designed a unique hi-def 3D camera system that fused two Sony HDC-F950

HD cameras 2½ inches apart to mimic the stereoscopic separation of human eyes. The

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Fusion Camera System has since been used for 3D movies such as Journey to the

Center of the Earth and the upcoming Tron Legacy, and at sporting events such as the

2007 NBA finals.

The 3D experience is at the heart of Avatar. (In fact, some suspect that Cameron

cannily delayed the movie's release to wait for more theaters to install 3D screens—

there will be more than 3000 for the launch.) Stereoscopic moviemaking has

historically been the novelty act of cinema. But Cameron sees 3D as a subtler

experience.

To film the live-action sequences of Avatar, he used a modified version of the Fusion

camera. The new 3D camera creates an augmented-reality view for Cameron as he

shoots, sensing its position on a motion-capture stage, and then integrating the live

actors into CG environments on the viewfinder. "It's a unique way of shooting stereo

movies," says visual-effects supervisor Stephen Rosenbaum.

"Cameron uses it to look into the environment; it's not about beating people over the

head with visual spectacle." This immersive 3D brings a heightened believability

to Avatar's live-action sequences—gradually bringing viewers deeper into the exotic

world of Pandora. In an early scene, Sully looks out the window as he flies over the

giant trees and waterfalls of the jungle moon, and the depth afforded by the 3D

perspective gives the planet mass and scale, making it as dizzyingly real for viewers

as it is for him.

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9…Idea behind the Virtual World:

Yet live-action 3D was hardly the biggest technical challenge. Only about 25 percent

of the movie was created using traditional live performances on sets. The rest takes

place in an entirely computer-generated world—combining performance capture with

virtual environments that have never before been realized on film. Conjuring up this

exotic world allowed Cameron to engage in "big-time design," he says, with six-

legged hammerhead thanators, armored direhorses, pterodactyl-like banshees,

hundreds of trees and plants, floating mountains and incredible landscapes, all created

from scratch. He drew upon his experience with deep-sea biology and plant life for

inspiration.

Sigourney Weaver, who plays botanist Grace Augustine, calls it "the most ambitious

movie I've ever been in. Every single plant and creature has come out of this crazy

person's head. This is what Cameron's inner 14-year-old wanted to see."

To bring his actors into this world, Cameron collaborated with Weta Digital, an

effects house founded by The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. Weta has

created some of the most groundbreaking characters in recent years, using human

performances to anima-te digital creatures such as Gollum in the Rings series and the

great ape in Jackson's 2005 version ofKing Kong. By now, the process of basic

motion capture is well established. Actors are dressed in "mocap" suits studded with

reflective reference markers and stripes, then cameras capture the basic movements of

a performance, which are later mapped to digital characters in a computer.

For actors, the process of performing within an imaginary world, squeezed into a

leotard while pretending to inhabit an alien body, is a challenge. Motion-capture

technology is capable of recording a 360-degree view of performances, so actors must

play scenes with no idea where the "camera" will eventually be. Weaver found the

experience liberating. "It's simpler," she says. "You just act. There's no hair or

makeup, nothing. It's just you and the material. You forget everything but the story

you're telling." Directing within a virtual set is more difficult. Most directors choose

their angles and shots on a computer screen in postproduction. But by then, most of

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the immediacy of the performance is lost. Cameron wanted to be able to see his actors

moving within the virtual environments while still on the motion-capture stage (called

the volume).So he challenged his virtual-production supervisor Glenn Derry to come

up with a virtual camera that could show him a low-resolution view of Pandora as he

shot the performances

The resulting swing camera (so called because its screen could swing to any angle to

give Cameron greater freedom of movement) is another of Avatar's breakthrough

techno-logies. The swing camera has no lens at all, only an LCD screen and markers

that record its position and orientation within the volume relative to the actors. That

position information is then run through an effects switcher, which feeds back low-

resolution CG versions of both the actors and the environment of Pandora to the

swing cam's screen in real time.

This virtual camera allowed Cameron to shoot a scene simply by moving through the

volume. Cameron could pick up the camera and shoot his actors photographically, as

the performance occurred, or he could reshoot any scene by walking through the

empty soundstage with the device after the actors were gone, capturing different

camera angles as the scene replayed.

But all of this technology can lead right back into the uncanny valley, because

capturing an actor's movements is only a small step toward creating a believable

digital chara-cter. Without the subtle expressions of the face, Cameron might as well

be playing with marionettes. Getting this crucial element right required him to push

Weta's technology far beyond anything the company had done before.

In fact, Cameron doesn't even like the term "motion capture" for the process use

on Avatar. He prefers to call it "performance capture." This may seem like semantics,

but to Cameron, the subtle facial expressions that define an actor's performance had

been lost for many of the digital characters that have come before. In those films, the

process of motion capture served only as a starting point for animators, who would

finish the job with digital brush strokes."Gollum's face was entirely animated by

hand," says Weta Digital effects master Joe Letteri."King Kong was a third or so

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straight performance capture. It was never automatic." This time, Cameron wanted to

keep the embellishment by animators to a minimum and let the actors drive their own

performances.

In order to pull more data from the actors' faces, Cameron reworked an old idea he

had sketched on a napkin back in 1995: fasten a tiny camera to the front of a helmet to

track every facial movement, from darting eyes and twitching noses to furrowing

eyebrows and the tricky interaction of jaw, lips, teeth and tongue. "I knew I could not

fail if I had a 100 percent closeup of the actor 100 percent of the time that traveled

with them wherever they went," he says. "That really makes a closeup come alive."

The information from the cameras produced a digital framework, or rig, of an actor's

face. The rig was then given a set of rules that applied the muscle movements of each

actor's face to that of the Avatar or the Na'vi that he or she was playing. To make a

CG character express the same emotion as a human actor, the rig had to translate

every arch of a human eyebrow directly to the digital character's face.

But it turns out there is no magic formula that can supplant hard work and lots of trial

and error. After Cameron complained about the uncanny-valley effect, Weta spent

another year perfecting the rig on Worthington's Avatar by tweaking the algorithms

that guided its movements and expressions until he came alive enough to meet

Cameron's sky-high standards. "It was torturous," Letteri admits. But when Weta was

finished, you could pour the motion-capture data into the rig and it would come out

the other side right.

With all the attention focused on Avatar, anything short of perfection may not be

good enough.Cameron is asking moviegoers to believe in a deep new universe of his

own design and to buy the concept that 9-foot-tall blue aliens can communicate

human emotions. If Cameron is wrong, then Avatar may be remembered as the

moment when the battle for the uncanny valley was lost. If he is right, the technology

will disappear behind the story line, and audiences will lose themselves in Avatar's

world.

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10…Development:

From January to April 2006, Cameron worked on the script and developed a culture

for the film's aliens, the Na'vi. Their language was created by Dr.Paul Frommer, a

linguist at USC.[13]

The Na'vi language has a lexicon of about 1000 words, with some

30 added by Cameron. The tongue's phonemesinclude ejective consonants (such as

the "kx" in "skxawng") that are found in the Amharic language of Ethiopia, and the

initial "ng" that Cameron may have taken from New Zealand Māori. Actress

Sigourney Weaver and the film's set designers met with Jodie S. Holt, professor

of plant physiology atUniversity of California, Riverside, to learn about the methods

used by botanists to study and sample plants, and to discuss ways to explain the

communication between Pandora's organisms depicted in the film.

From 2005 to 2007, Cameron worked with a handful of designers, including famed

fantasy illustrator Wayne Barlowe and renowned concept artist Jordu Schell, to shape

the design of the Na'vi with paintings and physical sculptures when Cameron felt that

3-D brush renderings were not capturing his vision, often working together in the

kitchen of Cameron's Malibu home. In July 2006, Cameron announced that he would

film Avatar for a mid 2008 release and planned to begin principal photography with

an established cast by February 2007. The following August, the visual effects

studio Weta Digital signed on to help Cameron produce Avatar. Stan Winston, who

had collaborated with Cameron in the past, joined Avatar to help with the film's

designs. Production design for the film took several years. The film had two different

production designers, and two separate art departments, one of which focused on

the flora and fauna of Pandora, and another that created human machines and human

factors. In September 2006, Cameron was announced to be using his own Reality

Camera System to film in 3-D. The system would use two high-definition cameras in

a single camera body to create depth perception.

Fox was wavering because of its painful experience with cost overruns and delays on

Cameron's previous picture, Titanic, even though Cameron rewrote Avatar's script to

combine several characters together and offered to cut his fee in case the film

flopped. Cameron installed a traffic light with the amber signal lit outside of co-

producer Jon Landau's office to represent the film's uncertain future. In mid-2006,

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Fox told Cameron "in no uncertain terms that they were passing on this film," so he

began shopping it around to other studios, and showed his proof-of-concept to Dick

Cook (then chairman of the Walt Disney Studios). However, when Disney attempted

to take over, Fox exercised its right of first refusal. In October 2006, Fox finally

agreed to commit to making Avatar after Ingenious Media agreed to back the film,

which reduced Fox's financial exposure to less than half of the film's official

$237 million budget. After Fox accepted Avatar, one skeptical Fox executive shook

his head and told Cameron and Landau, "I don't know if we're crazier for letting you

do this, or if you're crazier for thinking you can do this …"

In December 2006, Cameron described Avatar as "a futuristic tale set on a planet

200 years hence … an old-fashioned jungle adventure with an environmental

conscience [that] aspires to a mythic level of storytelling". The January 2007 press

release described the film as "an emotional journey of redemption and revolution" and

said the story is of "a wounded former Marine, thrust unwillingly into an effort to

settle and exploit an exotic planet rich in biodiversity, who eventually crosses over to

lead the indigenous race in a battle for survival". The story would be of an entire

world complete with an ecosystem of phantasmagorical plants and creatures, and

native people with a rich culture and language.

Estimates put the cost of the film at about $280–310 million to produce and an

estimated $150 million for marketing, noting that about $30 million in tax credits will

lessen the financial impact on the studio and its financiers. A studio spokesperson said

that the budget was "$237 million, with $150 million for promotion, end of story."

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11…Theme and Inspiration

Avatar is primarily an action-adventure journey of self-discovery, in the context

of imperialism and deep ecology. Cameron said his inspiration was "every single

science fiction book I read as a kid", and that he was particularly striving to update the

style of Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter series and the deep jungles of Pandora

were visualized from Disney's 37th animated film,Tarzan. The director has

acknowledged that Avatar shares themes with the films At Play in the Fields of the

Lord, The Emerald Forest, and Princess Mononoke, which feature clashes between

cultures and civilizations, and with Dances With Wolves, where a battered soldier

finds himself drawn to the culture he was initially fighting against.

In a 2007 interview with Time magazine, Cameron was asked about the meaning of

the term Avatar, to which he replied, "It's an incarnation of one of the Hindu

gods taking a flesh form. In this film what that means is that the human technology in

the future is capable of injecting a human's intelligence into a remotely located body,

a biological body."

The look of the Na'vi – the humanoids indigenous to Pandora – was inspired by a

dream that Cameron's mother had, long before he started work onAvatar. In her

dream, she saw a blue-skinned woman 12 feet (4 m) tall, which he thought was "kind

of a cool image". Also he said, "I just like blue. It's a good color … plus, there's a

connection to the Hindu deities, which I like conceptually." He included similar

creatures in his first screenplay (written in 1976 or 1977), which featured a planet

with a native population of "gorgeous" tall blue aliens. The Na'vi were based on them.

For the love story between characters Jake and Neytiri, Cameron applied a star

crossed love theme, and acknowledged its similarity to the pairing of Jack and Rose

from his film Titanic. Both couples come from radically different cultures that are

contemptuous of their relationship and are forced to choose sides between the

competing communities. He felt that whether or not the Jake and Neytiri love story

would be perceived as believable partially hinged on the physical attractiveness of

Neytiri's alien appearance, which was developed by considering her appeal to the all-

male crew of artists. Though Cameron felt Jake and Neytiri do not fall in love right

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away, their portrayers (Worthington and Saldana) felt the characters do. Cameron said

the two actors "had a great chemistry" during filming.

For the film's floating "Hallelujah Mountains", the designers drew inspiration from

"many different types of mountains, but mainly the karst limestone formations in

China." According to production designer Dylan Cole, the fictional floating rocks

were inspired by Mount Huang (also known as Huangshan), Guilin, Zhangjiajie,

among others around the world. Director Cameron had noted the influence of the

Chinese peaks on the design of the floating mountains.

To create the interiors of the human mining colony on Pandora, production designers

visited the Noble Clyde Boudreaux oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico during June

2007. They photographed, measured and filmed every aspect of the platform, which

was later replicated on-screen with photorealistic CGI during post-production.

Cameron said that he wanted to make "something that has this spoonful of sugar of all

the action and the adventure and all that" but also have a conscience "that maybe in

the enjoying of it makes you think a little bit about the way you interact with nature

and your fellow man". He added that "the Na'vi represent something that is our higher

selves, or our aspirational selves, what we would like to think we are" and that even

though there are good humans within the film, the humans "represent what we know

to be the parts of ourselves that are trashing our world and maybe condemning

ourselves to a grim future".

Cameron acknowledges that Avatar implicitly criticizes the United States' role in

the Iraq War and the impersonal nature of mechanized warfare in general. In reference

to the use of the term shock and awe in the film, Cameron said, "We know what it

feels like to launch the missiles. We don't know what it feels like for them to land on

our home soil, not in America." He said in later interviews, "… I think it's very

patriotic to question a system that needs to be corralled …" and, "The film is

definitely not anti-American." A scene in the film portrays the violent destruction of

the towering Na'vi Hometree, which collapses in flames after a missile attack, coating

the landscape with ash and floating embers. Asked about the scene's resemblance to

the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Cameron said he had been

"surprised at how much it did look like September 11".

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12…Development phases of Filming:

Principal photography: for Avatar began in April 2007 in Los Angeles

and Wellington, New Zealand. Cameron described the film as a hybrid with a full

live-action shoot in combination with computer-generated characters and live

environments. "Ideally at the end of the day the audience has no idea which they're

looking at," Cameron said. The director indicated that he had already worked four

months on non principal scenes for the film. The live action was shot with a modified

version of the proprietary digital 3-D Fusion Camera System, developed by Cameron

and Vince Pace. In January 2007, Fox had announced that 3-D filming

for Avatar would be done at 24 frames per second despite Cameron's strong opinion

that a 3-D film requires higher frame rate to make strobing less noticeable. According

to Cameron, the film is composed of 60% computer-generated elements and 40% live

action, as well as traditional miniatures.

Motion-capture photography: lasted 31 days at the Hughes Aircraft stage in Playa

Vista in Los Angeles. Live action photography began in October 2007 at Stone Street

Studios in Wellington, New Zealand, and was scheduled to last 31 days. More than a

thousand people worked on the production. In preparation of the filming sequences,

all of the actors underwent professional training specific to their characters such as

archery, horseback riding, firearm use, and hand-to-hand combat. They received

language and dialect training in the Na'vi language created for the film. Before

shooting the film, Cameron also sent the cast to the Hawaiian tropical rainforests to

get a feel for a rainforest setting before shooting on the soundstage.

During filming, Cameron made use of his virtual camera system, a new way of

directing motion-capture filmmaking. The system shows the actors' virtual

counterparts in their digital surroundings in real time, allowing the director to adjust

and direct scenes just as if shooting live action. According to Cameron, "It's like a big,

powerful game engine. If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can.

I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature and go through it on a 50 to 1

scale." Using conventional techniques, the complete virtual world cannot be seen until

the motion-capture of the actors is complete. Cameron said this process does not

diminish the value or importance of acting. On the contrary, because there is no need

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for repeated camera and lighting setups, costume fittings and make-up touch-ups,

scenes do not need to be interrupted repeatedly. Cameron described the system as a

"form of pure creation where if you want to move a tree or a mountain or the sky or

change the time of day, you have complete control over the elements".

Cameron gave fellow directors Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson a chance to test

the new technology. Spielberg said, "I like to think of it as digital makeup, not

augmented animation … Motion capture brings the director back to a kind of intimacy

that actors and directors only know when they're working in live theater." Spielberg

and George Lucas were also able to visit the set to watch Cameron direct with the

equipment.

To film the shots where CGI interacts with live action, a unique camera referred to as

a "simulcam" was used, a merger of the 3-D fusion camera and the virtual camera

systems. While filming live action in real time with the simulcam, the CGI images

captured with the virtual camera or designed from scratch, are superimposed over the

live action images as in augmented reality and shown on a small monitor, making it

possible for the director to instruct the actors how to relate to the virtual material in

the scene

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13…5 Innovations in AVATAR:

Performance Capture Workflow: A lot of the film was captured using a

performance capture technique similar to that of which Robert Zemeckis filmed

Beowulf. So Cameron developed a virtual camera which will allow his to point it at

his actors and see them as their computer generated characters in real time.

Simulcam: A camera set-up which allows them to follow or monitor a virtual

character which was captured in performance capture into a live action environment

in real-time. It also allows them to see what virtual backgrounds will look like in a

live-action shot. I know that Steven Spielberg had a set-up like this on A.I., but I think

it only showed him wireframes of buildings, and was very glitchy. My impression

from Cameron‘s quotes is that the new technology renders something a lot more

visual, probably akin to a video game (likely more last generation).

Facial Capture Head Rig: The actors in performance capture suits also wear a

camera rig on their heads that takes digital shots of the actor‘s face. This allows the

computer generated character to have 100% facial movement, even in the real-time

performance capture workflow mentioned above.

Facial Performance Replacement: In traditional filmmaking they use ADR (or

additional Dialogue Replacement) when filmmakers need a cleaner take of the actor‘s

dialogue, or need to fudge in a new line. But with a traditional film, you really need to

trick a shot to make it work. The lips don‘t always match up, and sometimes, if you

providing an entirely new line of dialogue, filmmakers usually resort to a wide shot or

a behind the head shot, so that you can‘t see the lips of the actor on-screen. Since 60%

of Avatar is performance capture, he has designed a way to insert a new facial

scan/dialogue capture on an existing performance.

Fusion 3-D Camera System: The Fusion 3-D camera system was co-developed by

James Cameron and Vince Pace. The rig uses two Sony HDCF950 HD cameras to

create stereoscopic 3-D. Cameron first used the system on his 2003 IMAX film

Ghosts of the Abyss.It has since been used by Robert Rodriguez on Spy Kids 3-D and

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The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, and most recently on Hannah Montana

and Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert and Journey to the Center of the

Earth. But I‘m not exactly sure what improvements Cameron made to the rig over the

last five years.

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14…A lesson of Managing Innovation risk from Movie:

Who would have guessed that a movie about blue aliens could teach us anything about

new product innovation?

Of course, I‘m not talking about the movie itself, but the story of how it was made –

something that was chronicled in a recent Business Week article.

James Cameron, the creator and director of Avatar, has a reputation for making

Blockbuster movies with cutting edge special effects that deliver billions in

revenue. Films like Terminator, Aliens, True Lies, and Titanic. That‘s why Fox was all

ears when he came to them with a screenplay for a new 3D film that promised to

change the way that people viewed movies and return people to the box office.

But Cameron also has a reputation for going over budget – way over budget. That‘s

why Fox made a really smart move in managing the innovation risk for this film. They

used an assessment and feasibility step in deciding whether to resource the project.

The idea of proving feasibility before funding product development might seem a little

buttoned down at first. But it seems to make sense even in a free-wheeling and big-

spending industry like Hollywood. With a proposed budget of $237 million, Fox

decided that the investment was just too big to jump in one go. Instead they gave

Cameron $10 million for proof of concept.

Fox‘s approach with Avatar demonstrates another important point too – that invention

and innovation are separate activities. The proof of concept wasn‘t about the invention

or the technology. Cameron had already invested his own money in the invention of

simultaneous 3D and 2D film making technology. The feasibility step was to prove that

it would be commercially viable.

The movie industry has been hammered by an abundance of leisure time choices

including Hi-Def movies on home big screens, video games, TV and the internet. If

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Avatar was going to be successful, Cameron had to create something so compelling and

so unique that people would pay more to go to the theater.

The proof of concept demonstrated that Cameron could deliver on his vision and Fox

eventually lined up the entire $237 million. Of course, with box office results hitting

the $1 billion mark in its first 17 days, the rest of the story is quickly becoming history.

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15…Path breaking record on world-wide Box offices:

US AND CANADA BOX OFFICES:

Highest grossing 3rd weekend

Highest grossing 4th weekend

Highest grossing 5th weekend

Highest grossing 6th weekend

Highest grossing 7th weekend

Biggest January weekend.

Highest grossing movie in US and Canada

Fastest to reach $600 million.

Main contributor to the biggest aggregated weekend of all time.

Highest opening weekend for an environmentalist film

Largest gross on New Year day

Highest-grossing CGI star movie

Highest-grossing paraplegic film

Highest-grossing environmentalist movie

Highest-grossing SCI-FI film

Highest grossing movie released in 2009

Highest PG-13 grossing movie of all time

Highest-grossing Martin Luther King weekend

Most Oscar Nominations of 2010 (9, but all-time record is 14 by All About

Eve and Titanic)

WORLD-WIDE RECORD:

Avatar became the highest-grossing movie in history on January 25 after only 41

days of play

The film was No. 1 in all of the 106 markets it opened the week of December

2009

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Except for India, it was No. 1 in every market worldwide in its second week of

release.

It was the highest-grossing movie worldwide for 7 weeks in a row

It became the second-highest-grossing movie worldwide only 20 days after its

initial release

Highest grossing movie of 2009

Fastest pirated movie in history

First 3-D movie to reach $1 billion worldwide

Reached $1 billion sales outside US and Canada in 28 days

First movie in history to reach $2 billion worldwide

ALL TIME RECORDS IN OTHER COUNTRIES:

After 41 days of release it held the record in 24 markets:

China ($204 million)

Germany ($157.6 million)

United Kingdom ($150.02 million) (now beaten by Skyfall)

Russia ($117.1 million)

South Korea ($105.5 million)

Spain ($110.0 million)

Australia ($105.8 million)

Chile ($10.5 million)

Hong Kong ($22.9 million)

UAE ($7.3 million

Colombia ($13.6 million)

Czech Republic ($11.8 million)

Portugal ($9.3 million)

Singapore ($8.1 million)

Ukraine ($8.7 million)

Hungary ($7.3 million)

Romania ($5.6 million)

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Bulgaria ($3.4 million)

Slovenia ($1.8 million)

Dominican Republic ($1.3 million)

Latvia ($1.5 million)

Serbia ($1.3 million)

Kuwait ($1.1 million)

Qatar ($883,412)

Jordan ($752,520)

Jamaica ($476,301)

Bahrain ($896,623)

OTHER RECORDS:

Highest sixth week sales (over 100M) overseas

Over $100M in France, China, Germany, UK, Russia

Highest opening week Italy

Russia opening theaters

Highest fourth weekend sales

Highest Dominican Republic opening weekend

Gained six weekends in a row at least 100M per weekend abroad

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16…About the Innovator (Here, Director)

James Francis Cameron (born August 16, 1954) is a Canadian film director, film

producer, deep-sea explorer, screenwriter, visual artist and editor. His writing and

directing work includes The Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986), The

Abyss (1989), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), True

Lies (1994), Titanic (1997), Dark Angel (2000–02), and Avatar (2009). In the time

between making Titanic andAvatar, Cameron spent several years creating many

documentary films (specifically underwater documentaries) and co-developed the

digital 3D Fusion Camera System. Described by a biographer as part-scientist and part-

artist, Cameron has also contributed to underwater filming and remote

vehicle technologies. On March 26, 2012, Cameron reached the bottom of the Mariana

Trench, the deepest part of the ocean, in the Deepsea Challenger submersible. He was

the first person to do this in a solo descent, and only the third person to do so ever

He has been nominated for six Academy Awards overall and won three for Titanic. In

total, Cameron's directorial efforts have grossed approximately US$2 billion in North

America and US$6 billion worldwide. Not adjusted for inflation,

Cameron's Titanic and Avatar are the two highest-grossing films of all time at

$2.19 billion and $2.78 billion respectively. In March 2011 he was named Hollywood's

top earner by Vanity Fair, with estimated 2010 earnings of $257 million.

James Cameron and Avatar

In June 2005, Cameron was announced to be working on a project tentatively titled

"Project 880" (now known to be Avatar) in parallel with another project, Battle

Angel (an adaptation of the manga series Battle Angel Alita). Both movies were to be

shot in 3D. By December, Cameron stated that he wanted to film Battle Angel first,

followed by Avatar. However in February 2006, he switched goals for the two film

projects and decided to film Avatar first. He mentioned that if both films are successful,

he would be interested in seeing a trilogy being made for both.

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Avatar had an estimated budget of over $300 million and was released on December

18, 2009. This marked his first feature film since 1997's Titanic. It is composed almost

entirely of computer-generated animation, using a more advanced version of the

"performance capture" technique used by director Robert Zemeckis in The Polar

Express. James Cameron had written an 80 page scriptment for Avatar in 1995 and

announced in 1996 that he would make the film after completing Titanic. In December

2006, Cameron explained that the delay in producing the film since the 1990s had been

to wait until the technology necessary to create his project was advanced enough. The

film was originally scheduled to be released in May 2009 but was pushed back to

December 2009 to allow more time for post-production on the complex CGI and to

give more time for theatres worldwide to install 3D projectors. Cameron originally

intendedAvatar to be 3D-only.

Avatar broke several Box Office records during its initial theatrical run. It grossed

$749.7 million in the United States and Canada and more than $2.74 billion worldwide,

to become the highest-grossing film of all time in the United States and Canada,

surpassing Cameron's Titanic. Avatar also became the first movie to ever earn more

than $2 billion worldwide. Including revenue from the re-release of Avatar featuring

extended footage, it grossed $760.5 million in the U.S. and Canada, and more than

$2.78 billion worldwide. It was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best

Picture and Best Director, and won three for Best Art Direction, Best

Cinematography and Best Visual Effects

Avatar's blockbuster success made Cameron the highest earner in Hollywood for 2010,

netting him $257 million as reported by Vanity Fair.

Awards received by James Cameron

Year Film Role Notes

1984 The Terminator Director, Writer Saturn Award for Best Writing

Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival - Grand

Prize

1985 Rambo: First Writer Razzie Award for Worst Screenplay

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Blood Part II

1986 Aliens Director, Writer Saturn Award for Best Director

Saturn Award for Best Writing

Hugo Award for Best Dramatic

Presentation

Kinema Junpo Awards - Best Foreign

Language Film

1989 The Abyss Director, Writer Saturn Award for Best Director

Nominated for Saturn Award for Best

Writing

Nominated for Hugo Award for Best

Dramatic Presentation

1991 Terminator 2:

Judgment Day

Director, Writer

and Producer

Saturn Award for Best Director

Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction

Film

Hugo Award for Best Dramatic

Presentation

MTV Movie Award for Best Movie

Mainichi Film Award for Best Foreign

Language Film

People's Choice Award for Favorite

Dramatic Motion Picture

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding

Dramatic Presentation

Nominated for Japan Academy Prize for

Outstanding Foreign Language Film

1994 True Lies Director, Writer

and Producer

Saturn Award for Best Director

Nominated for Japan Academy Prize for

Outstanding Foreign Language Film

1997 Titanic Director, Writer,

Producer and

Editor

Academy Award for Best Director

Academy Award for Best Film Editing

Academy Award for Best Picture

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Golden Globe Award for Best Director

Golden Globe Award for Best Motion

Picture - Drama

Empire Award for Best Film

Amanda Award for Best Foreign Feature

Film

Eddie Award for Best Edited Feature

Film

Blue Ribbon Award for Best Foreign

Language Film

Broadcast Film Critics Association

Award for Best Director

Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics

Association Award for Best Director

Directors Guild of America Award for

Outstanding Directorial Achievement in

Motion Pictures

Producers Guild of America Award for

Motion Picture Producer of the Year

MTV Movie Award for Best Movie

Film Award for Best Foreign Language

Film

Japan Academy Prize for Outstanding

Foreign Language Film

Mexican Cinema Journalists - Best

Foreign Film

International Monitor Award for

Theatrical Releases - Color Correction

Kansas City Film Critics Circle Award

for Best Director

Kansas City Film Critics Circle Award

for Best Film

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Florida Film Critics Circle Award for

Best Film

Kids' Choice Award for Favorite Movie

Las Vegas Film Critics Society Award

for Best Director

Las Vegas Film Critics Society Award

for Best Film

Mainichi Film Award for Best Foreign

Language Film

National Board of Review Spotlight

Award - For the use of special effects

technology

Online Film Critics Society Award for

Best Director

People's Choice Award for Favorite

Dramatic Motion Picture

People's Choice Award for Favorite

Motion Picture

Satellite Award for Best Director

2003 Ghosts of the

Abyss

Director and

Producer

Nominated by the Broadcast Film Critics

Association for Best Documentary

2009 Avatar Director, Writer,

Producer and

Editor

Golden Globe Award for Best Director

Golden Globe Award for Best Motion

Picture - Drama

Empire Award for Best Director

Empire Award for Best Film

Broadcast Film Critics Association

Award for Best Editing

Broadcast Film Critics Association

Award for Best Action Movie

Japan Academy Prize for Outstanding

Foreign Language Film

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Lumière Award for Live Action 3-D

Feature [Film]

Youthfulness Award for Favourite Flick

New York Film Critics Online Award

for Best Film

Phoenix Film Critics Society Award for

Best Editing

Santa Barbara International Film

Festival Lucky Brand Modern Master

Award

PETA 's Proggy Award for Outstanding

Feature Film

Environmental Media Award for Feature

Film

St. Louis Gateway Film Critics

Association Award for Most Original,

Innovative or Creative Film

Saturn Award - Visionary Award

Saturn Award for Best Director

Saturn Award for Best Writing

Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction

Film

Scream Award for Best Director

Scream Award for 3-D Top Three

Teen Choice Award for Favorite Sci-Fi

Movie

People's Choice Award for Favorite 3-D

Live Action Movie

People's Choice Award for Favorite 3-D

Animated Movie

Cinema of Brazil - Best Foreign

Language Film

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Italian National Syndicate of Film

Journalists - Best 3-D Film Director

Nikkan Sports Film Award for Most

Popular Film

Rembrandt Award for Best Foreign Film

Venice Film Festival - Most Creative 3-

D Film/Stereoscopic Film of the Year

(after release) 2,396th star on

the Hollywood Walk of Fame

(after release) Visual Effects Society -

Lifetime Achievement Award

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17…Some Findings from this Assignment:

Avatar as Innovation: Disrupting the Film Industry

Why do we care about disruptive innovation?

It‘s cool.

It‘ll make us rich and well-respected.

It‘s the natural way to leverage our big, expensive MBA brains to add

value to our teams, projects, and organizations. Yeah.

While there are many fascinating angles to analyze Avatar‘s innovation

We are going to focus on three key areas

Three key areas of Focus

Financial

Technological

Social

Financial Innovation

Ludicrously massive financial success

Highest grossing movie of all time ($3B)

Broke Blu-Ray sales records of 2.7m in 4 days.

Raised the price point for movie tickets From $10 to $14 for 3D, and

$16 for IMAX 3D

Incremental: - Willingness to increase costs of production

- New capital costs for theatres

Disruptive: - Premium product priced above IMAX and 2D

- James Cameron‘ intended to shift the balance of powers within

the industry

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Technological Innovation

James Cameron is considered ―part Scientist, part Artist‖ – developed new

3D movie making technology

Revolutionary 3D Fusion Camera System modeled after the eye

Performance Capture Animation

3d camera to disruptive

1. Cameron took almost a decade off between Titanic and Avatar to develop his

dream for 3D

2. The Fusion Camera was modeled after the eyes capturing two perspectives

simultanous

3. Cameron also created new cameras, new screens, new soundstages

4. New Animation System allowed for actor to avoid lengthy makeup but also do

more than read a script. Cameron‘s perfomance capture system allow actors to

truly act despite a largely CGI or animated products

Incremental : - 3D Fusion Camera System

- Performance Capture Animation

Disruptive: - 3D : A renewed and exploding Platform

Social Innovation

James Cameron

Visits to Brazil‘s Amazon and Alberta‘s tar sands

Social Action inspired by Avatar

The Avatar Project: a program to support military amputees

Avatar-themed Palestinian protests

Avatar-themed protests in Jakarta to protect orangutans

Incremental: -Using Fictional stories to inspire social action.

-Coordinating social action with existing organizations &

movements

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Disruptive: -Avatar‘s scale and power have inspired grassroots social

action across the globe. It‘s a platform.

What says Porter‘s five force model after AVATAR as Innovation:

So, Finally…………….

Was Avatar Disruptive Innovation or Incremental Innovation?

And answer is…………..

It was not only Disruptive. It was also Incremental

Innovation…..

Firm

Suppliers

Compe

titors

Buyers

New Entrants

• Digital Imaging

• Cameras

• Production Skills

• Technical

Training

• 3D Accessories

• Increase in

production

costs

• Shift in

Marketing

and positions

• Digitizing Theatres

• Imax Expansion

• Movie goers paying more

• Raised cost of

entry • Threat to

smaller,

emerging

production

houses

How James Cameron's Innovative New 3D Techniques Created

Avatar???

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18….Bibliography

James Wigney (August 15, 2010). "Avatar director slams bandwagon

jumpers".Herald Sun. Australia. Retrieved August 16, 2010.

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American Film Ever … And Possibly The Most Anti-American One Too.". Bleeding

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Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora. HarperCollins.

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Han Sunhee (February 5, 2010). "'Avatar' goes 4D in Korea". Variety. Archivedfrom

the original on February 10 2010. Retrieved February 8, 2010.

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19…Photo Gallery

How James Cameron's Innovative New 3D Techniques Created

Avatar???

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How James Cameron's Innovative New 3D Techniques Created

Avatar???

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