Titanic director James Cameron discussed yesterday at Microsoft Advance ’08 his new film Avatar, about a man who tries to become a miner by combining his being with an alien during an interplanetary war in which aliens can manifest themselves through human bodies — avatars. “Avatar is the single most complex piece of filmmaking ever made. We have 1,600 shots for a 2.5 hour movie. It’s not with a single CGI character, like King Kong or Gollum. We have hundreds of photo-realistic CG characters. The essence of storytelling stays the same. Intense CG (computer-generated) scenes with multiple shots doesn’t change that.” The filmmaker has created an entire world for the movie as well as an alien language (the film is partly subtitled), a complete ecosystem of phantasmagorical plants and creatures, and a native people with a rich culture and language. Cameron, who will be making all his films in stereoscopic 3D moving forward, added that “Avatar will make people truly experience something. One more layer of the suspension of disbelief will be removed. All the syn-thespians are photo-realistic. Now that we’ve achieved it, we discovered CG characters in 3D look more real than in 2D. Your brain is cued it’s a real thing not a picture and discounting part of image that makes it look fake. (…) What could happen is now that digital cinema revolution has taken place is killer app is 3D. Dreamworks has announced all its animated films will be made and projected in 3-D. Gaming will be changed by 3-D. Consumer electronics people will need to make players stereo-enabled monitors. Future version of Windows should be fully stereoscopic. Smaller devices already are 3D enabled without glasses. If you play “Avatar” on a 50 inch monitor, you’re in the game.” Fox will release Avatar in theater in December 2009.