It’s been pretty quiet on the filming front when it comes to the ‘Avatar‘ sequels, but James Cameron has just opened up a little on some of what we can expect when moving forward in the series. He gave some information that may hint at part of the upcoming plot and quite a bit about how the film might be shot.

Clearly Camerson is still working on being able to prepare the films and is in fact developing new software to be able to bring his ideas to the big screen. That’s right! What was used to create ‘Avatar’ was not powerful enough with what Cameron has planned next!

“We’re still in the early stages. Right now we’re developing the software. I’m writing the scripts. We’re designing all the creatures and characters and the settings, and so on. So, I’m not actually directing yet, but I’m doing all the other creative processes that lead up to that. It’s going very well. I think it’s going to be spectacular. You’ll see new worlds, new habitats, new cultures. The primary conflict between the human view kind of dominating nature and the Na’vi view of being integrated into nature is the same, but it manifests itself in very different ways.”

At least a lot of the above and what they’ve learned from shooting the first film should greatly speed up production on the next one. Not only have they learned a lot, but the new tools in creation should just make everything go faster.

“The first film… took almost four years to make. We expect to be able to accelerate the process quite a bit, because we’ve improved a lot of the software and the computer graphics tools, and we’ve been working very closely with Weta Digital down here in New Zealand developing a whole new suite of tools to speed up the process.”

One thing a lot of people might be curious on though is how the film will be shot. The high frame rate in certain films lately have brought into question if it should be used and Cameron is looking into that:

“I’m studying [high frame rate]. I haven’t made a final decision yet, whether the entire film will be made at high frame rate or parts of it. You know, we’ll be shooting at a native resolution of probably 4K and so then there should be a lot of true 4K theaters by then as well.”

We all already know that the films are almost guaranteed to be visually stunning, but 2hat we care about is the plot. Will it be worth watching for anything past the visuals (as many complained that the first film wasn’t) :

“The thing that’s great about ‘Avatar,’ it’s such a rich world, I can explore any theme or any idea that I want. Once you’ve got the characters that an audience loves, it’s great to surprise them and make changes and turns that they don’t expect. And you don’t have to spend so much time of the movie setting up all that stuff, because the audience will remember from the previous film.”

That’s kind of a mixed response. Not heavy on the details but we know it’ll grow off of the first film. However, in another interview one key line stands out:

“I think it’s going to be spectacular. You’ll see new worlds, new habitats, new cultures. The primary conflict between the human view kind of dominating nature and the Na’vi view of being integrated into nature is the same, but it manifests itself in very different ways.”

So it looks like we’re going to see new worlds (and new civilizations, boldly going where no CGI has gone before!) and even if the plot can’t make up for it we should be in for another one hell of a visual treat when the second film is released on December of 2016!

Sources: Blastr, Slash Film