UPDATED: James Cameron's Avatar - Some footage has been seen

TIME Magazine's Josh Quittner saw brand new footage from James Cameron's highly-anticipated Avatar, which 20th Century Fox plans to release on 18th December. Here are some snippets from the article:

More than a thousand people have worked on it, at a cost in excess of $300 million, and it represents digital filmmaking's bleeding edge. Cameron wrote the treatment for it in 1995 as a way to push his digital-production company to its limits. The movie pioneers two unrelated technologies--e-motion capture, which uses images from tiny cameras rigged to actors' heads to replicate their expressions, and digital 3-D.

The film is set in the future, and most of the action takes place on a mythical planet, Pandora. The actors work in an empty studio; Pandora's lush jungle-aquatic environment is computer-generated in New Zealand by Jackson's special-effects company, Weta Digital, and added later.

I couldn't tell what was real and what was animated--even knowing that the 9-ft.-tall blue, dappled dude couldn't possibly be real. The scenes were so startling and absorbing that the following morning, I had the peculiar sensation of wanting to return there, as if Pandora were real.

Cameron wasn't surprised. One theory, he says, is that 3-D viewing "is so close to a real experience that it actually triggers memory creation in a way that 2-D viewing doesn't." His own theory is that stereoscopic viewing uses more neurons. That's possible. After watching all that 3-D, I was a bit wiped out. I was also totally entertained.

The sci-fi action-adventure stars Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Michelle Rodriguez, Giovanni Ribisi, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Peter Mensah, Laz Alonso, Wes Studi, Stephen Lang and Matt Gerald.

UPDATE: Thanks to Pam and AMZ for passing along this info - This morning, the blogosphere was rightfully up in arms over the reported cost of James Cameron's 3-D live-action epic, Avatar, which Time said was north of $300 million. It turns out, the movie's not nearly as expensive: it's currently budgeted at more than $200 million, which puts it in relatively the same ballpark as Cameron's last major film, Titanic, which luckily made all of its money back thanks to being the highest-grossing film of all time. - Business Insider

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