The Making of Avatar [ハードカバー]

First off let me tell you this book is thick and heavy. When the delivery driver handed it to me I was amazed at the weight of it. Big hardcover, dust-jacket, and over 270 pages...you definitely feel like your getting your money's worth on that fact alone.

The authors Lisa Fitzpatrick and Jody Duncan did a perfect job with this book. Jody Duncan writes for 'Cinefex' magazine and I was impressed with her technical article of 'Avatar' when I purchased the magazine issue back in December, so I was naturally excited to see she would be involved with this book as well. She went above and beyond with this one though in my opinion.

Like I said, this isn't a small book by any means, you get high-quality bindings with nice huge pages which feature enormous amounts of details that go into the making of this movie. It goes into every aspect of this film's production including; pre-production, principle photography, art-direction, music, editing, and the post-production process. Also found within the book are pictures of concept art and hi-res production stills from the film, behind the scenes pictures of the filming sets, equipment, virtual-camera system, 3D Fusion camera system, the actors, motion-capture systems, etc...I could keep going on but I'll just say there is all kinds of stuff in it. Not to mention, it also covers the elaborate techniques taken by the production team responsible for the state of the art visual effects used for the film.

Careful attention to detail was taken, every page has something interesting about it and thats what I liked most about it. Even the pictures have very detailed captions to explain exactly what you are seeing and how it relates to the words you are reading next to it. Some of the pictures for example are an actual film still from the film, and next to it will be a picture of the exact same shot of the actor in the motion capture suit on the sound-stage, which in turn shows you how well the visual-effects team transformed it into what we saw.

Overall, I am really impressed with this book as a whole and would highly recommend it to fans and non-fans alike because of its interesting reading and excellent pictures. I have several movie-production books for other films in my collection and this one is now easily the best one.

'Avatar' was a film production process that broke new ground in the industry, and if you're curious as to how it all came together to create a $2.7 billion grossing movie, look no further...5-stars.

I'll start by saying that I don't write many reviews on Amazon, but this book is such an excellent reference for fans I had to share my experience reading it.

I was initially nervous about purchasing this book despite the seemingly amazing price that Amazon offers it for compared to the list price; I had read that the "Art of Avatar" book was somewhat of a let-down for those who were as interested about the tech behind the film as they were the concept art. However, I'm quite glad to say that after finishing this book (which I practically sat down and read front to back over the course of two days) I don't regret a single cent that I spent on it.

To begin with (as another reviewer noted) this is a rather high quality book. It is large ("coffee table sized," as they put it) and is bound very well. The 270+ pages are heavy duty and the printing is excellent, though when I read it I did notice that it had a small chemical smell which to me was slightly worse than what you would normally expect from a book such as this. It wasn't enough to distract me from reading, but was noticeable at first.

That being said, the content in it is absolutely fantastic. In the spirit of full disclosure I'll also admit that I was a gigantic fan of this movie when it came out, seeing it multiple times in theaters as well as getting the movie poster and the "Pandora Survival Guide" in addition to the movie itself when it was initially released. But after reading it, I can quite confidently say that this book paired with the upcoming collector's edition of the film may be the end-all complete Avatar experience that people like me wanted immediately after watching the movie. Pictures are large and there's plenty of text which means copious amounts of content.

I had a good idea before getting into this book about how much effort went into production, but somehow the news stories and interviews just don't tell the whole story. This book really impresses upon you the granular level of control that Cameron had over the production of the film, essentially hand-approving every single aspect of the world of Pandora. To say that he went over the creature, set, environment and camera details with fine toothed comb would be putting it mildly. Additionally, the book spends a good deal of time talking about the technological aspects that the animators at WETA Digital went through to get from the crude performance capture data to the beautiful, photo-realistic result. It was refreshing to read in great detail about exactly how the wire-frames of characters were developed and things like the fact that the final characters required subsurface light scattering during the render process to really sell the reality to the viewer. Maybe I'm just an engineering nerd, but I found the descriptions of these processes to be extremely complete and interesting.

Of course the book also contains a good deal of concept art from pre-production, but this is something that I'm sure "The Art of Avatar" has a leg up on. However, this is somewhat mitigated by the inclusion of set pictures during filming in the "volume" including frame-matched comparisons between the rough performance capture shoots in 2007 and the final product two years later. As impressive as these are, I imagine the collector's Blu-ray will be much more interesting with full-motion comparisons.

A slightly disappointing note is the seemingly rushed description of what I am sure was a tremendous amount of work that went into the sound effects and score for the picture. I was disappointed when Avatar didn't get any Academy Awards for its audio and I was very afraid coming to the end of the book that it wasn't going to be discussed at all, but within the last few pages the writers manage to throw in a sufficient amount of detail on the sound and score.

All in all this is an excellent reference guide for those who want to know more about the making of the movie and who, like me, are huge enough fans that they can't wait for the collector's edition Blu-ray to release. Buy with confidence if you are at all interested.

I'm a huge Avatar fan, and so I've bought, and read, most of the books about Avatar. This one is far and away the best. It's the book "The Art of Avatar" should have been, and then some!

It's a really big tome, with page after page of beautiful full-colored pictures. It has everything from pictures from the movie, to concept art, to pictures of the cast, to props etc. It's far more than just an outstanding picture book however. It's got all kinds of information about the people behind the film, how some of the scenes were done, and all kinds of other information about the production of the film. Great great great, not only is it a great book and a great keepsake, but it is a tremendous value as well.