January 12, 2005
Cameron Talks Angel 3-D

Director James Cameron told SCI FI Wire that he plans to film his upcoming SF epic movie Battle Angel with the same high-tech 3-D digital cameras he used to make the documentaries Ghosts of the Abyss and Aliens of the Deep. "I've sort of been waiting until the right moment to make a big movie, and we believe that moment is now," Cameron said in an interview. "A few years ago I started down this path of creating this 3-D camera system, and once I started working in that, I couldn't imagine myself going back and shooting with the camera stuff that I used before. The question is, at what point can I use the kind of imaging that we're able to do now for a feature film?”

Battle Angel is an SF movie based on the Japanese manga series Battle Angel Alita, about a cyborg in the distant future. Cameron said that the project was partially delayed by exhibitors' reluctance to move to digital projection. "By early summer of '07 we expect to have somewhere around a thousand digital 3-D theaters that will be able to show an image that looks more or less like what you saw in the Imax theater, but the Imax theater was film, and this is going to be digital projection," Cameron said. "The pacing item on that is digital cinema and the changeover to d-cinema. It is going to be happening throughout North America and eventually Europe and so on, where they are literally going to replace every projector in North America in the next five or six years. Because in order to display the stereo, the 3-D, you need to have those digital projectors."

Cameron added that he wanted to wait to shoot the film until technology allowed him to create the best possible image. "The next time we shoot, we're going to use the new generation of the camera system, which is the new Sony SR compression, so it's inherently got a little more dynamic range and a little better resolution," Cameron said. "We think we're getting to a level where we're basically the equivalent of capturing two side-by-side 4K images," he added, referring to Sony's new digital projection system. "It really allows that, for a theatrical feature, I could blow the image up double and still have more resolution than a 35mm film.”