Cameron Pushes the Limits of Visual Effects; Changes Film Forever
They were looking over footage from a day’s dive when Cameron asked Pace a question: What would it take to build “the holy grail of cameras,” a high-definition rig that could deliver feature-film quality in both 2-D and 3-D? Pace wasn’t sure — he was no expert but knew about the cheap red-and-blue paper glasses of conventional 3-D filmmaking. They were notoriously uncomfortable, and the images could cause headaches if the projectors weren’t calibrated perfectly. Cameron believed there must be a way to do it better. What he really wanted to talk about was his vision for the next generation of cameras: maneuverable, digital, high-resolution, 3-D.
Inventing such a camera wouldn’t be easy, but Cameron said he was ready to break new ground. He mentioned a mysterious, long-gestating film project that would bring viewers to an alien planet. Cameron didn’t want to make the movie unless viewers could experience the planet viscerally, in 3-D. Since no satisfactory 3-D cameras existed, he’d have to build one. He’d brought Pace on the Pacific adventure to ask if the underwater cameraman wanted to help. His goal seemed kind of extreme, but Pace thought it sounded interesting and signed on. “Jim had a clear ambition on the dive trip,” Pace says. “It was fun, but I didn’t really know what I was getting into.”
Two months later, Cameron sent Pace a $17,000 first-class ticket from Los Angeles to Tokyo, and soon they were sitting in front of the engineers at Sony’s hi-def-camera division. Pace was there to help persuade Sony to separate the lens and image sensor from the processor on the company’s professional-grade HD camera. The bulky CPU could then be kept a cable-length away from the lens — rather than struggling with a conventional 450-pound 3-D system, a camera operator would just have to handle a 50-pound, dual-lens unit.
Sony agreed to establish a new line of cameras, and, using the prototype, Pace set to work. After three months, he had fitted the lenses into a rig that allowed an operator to precisely control the 3-D imaging. He figured they’d start with a simple test using an actor or two, but Cameron had other ideas. He asked Pace to install the gear in a rented World War II-era P-51 fighter and then sent him up in a B-17 Flying Fortress. Cameron jumped in behind the pilot of the P-51 and once airborne started filming while the pilot fired .50-caliber machine gun blanks at Pace’s B-17. “It was my first taste of what Jim considers ‘testing,’” Pace says.
No matter the success of Avatar in the box office, Cameron successfully pushed the bounds of film here. And for that, we're all better off.
