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Alma: Pixar Meets The Twilight Zone
The Avatar Dream
I like dreamers. What I like even more is people that stick to their dreams when everything tells them their dream is impossible. I have dreams, some are so big that I won’t even share them with most people, but I believe something is brewing and I will put the pieces of the puzzle together soon enough.
Having said that I read this article that I want to share. I am not the biggest fan of Avatar, saw it twice mainly because the first time I had just finished dinner and was so full I was falling asleep. I think the movie is a masterpiece in its technology and beauty, I love colors and there were plenty of colorful things there. Now, after reading this article I appreciate the movie even more. Avatar was a dream that if the dreamer had been too fast in making it there’s a chance it would’ve been a huge mistake.
In 1977, a 22-year-old truck driver named James Cameron went to see Star Wars with a pal. His friend enjoyed the movie; Cameron walked out of the theater ready to punch something. He was a college dropout and spent his days delivering school lunches in Southern California’s Orange County. But in his free time, he painted tiny models and wrote science fiction — stories set in galaxies far, far away. Now he was facing a deflating reality: He had been daydreaming about the kind of world that Lucas had just brought to life. Star Wars was the film he should have made.
It got him so angry he bought himself some cheap movie equipment and started trying to figure out how Lucas had done it. He infuriated his wife by setting up blindingly bright lights in the living room and rolling a camera along a track to practice dolly shots. He spent days scouring the USC library, reading everything he could about special effects. He became, in his own words, “completely obsessed.”
