"Avatar producer Jon Landau drops clues to sequels "

[Human No More]

The Monday Q&A: Avatar producer Jon Landau drops clues to sequels - The Globe and Mail

Nothing we really didn't know, but a good read

I think every movie has to stand alone. We won’t look at movie two as a bridge to movie three. It’s mapped to be its own standalone movie. And that movie is going to have to deliver on the same emotional, thematic and epic scale that the first movie did.

When we finished Titanic, people asked, what are you going to do next? We never thought that Avatar would surpass Titanic. But what we believed was that Avatar would be a great movie on its own. I told people that’s it’s a little bit like their own children. You don’t have a favorite child. Each one has its own talent and skill sets, and that’s how we look at our movies.

One new(ish) thing is this though:

One of the areas we are trying to push toward is higher frame rates. If you look at film 24 frames per second, which is what in-theatre presentations are presented at, it came from the minimum requirement for sound in the 1920s! Nobody took into account really the visual side of it. That’s why we see strobing and flickering [on the screen], which are exacerbated in 3D. But the same digital projectors, that are capable of running high-quality 3D, are also capable of running at a higher frame rate.

So if we ran at 48 frames [a second], our digital-effects team would have 24 more frames per second with which to animate, express emotions, do all those things. So we’d like to see a movement in that area.

Great news!
The low framerates of films and TV have always been an annoyance to me

Do you sometimes wish you could forget Avatar and make some neo-realist film like Bicycle Thieves?

You know what I like about films? I like creating worlds. I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in a lot of movies that do that. People turn to entertainment for escapism. If we can provide them with an escape from where they live, then we’ve succeeded.

Now this is what makes me so happy for the future of Avatar