Major "Avatar" Set Piece Details - See Through the Eyes of an Alien!

**UPDATE: March 7 - Jim here, got a MASSIVE update to Michael's story from a MarketSaw reader by the name of Cremany from Germany. He is claiming to have seen a 3 minute clip sequence of Na'vi running through Pandora! He also says there are 2 more clips involved - check out his quotes from the comments section of this post:

ok... i asked a friend who was at CeBit with me and he saw the whole sequence of avatar (3 minutes)! It was 100% avatar, but it wasn't a promotion for the movie, it was a promotion for a company which works on the photorealistic enviroment in the movie. The company uses 3 clips from avatar to present the technology.

the clip is in a first-person viewpoint and shows a person running on a a root very fast, suddenly the root ends and the person jumps to another root and start running again. you can see big trees in the size of a skyscraper, it is a very dusty and dark.
a friend told me the second clip shows a convoy drivinig through a canyon and suddenly a few big rocks roll into the canyon and the third clip looks like the inside of a huge mushroom with a crystal in the middle.
the clips are really photorealistic but you can see it's computer animated... impressiv but not mind-melting. it's very hard for me to explain because i didn't give the clip a lot of attention...i didn't realize that this was from avatar.

it was only first-person, but in the second clip my friend saw a few na'vis.but when i saw the clip i didn't know it could be avatar before i read the topic here on this site. i wasn't sure, so i ask my friend and he knew more aboud it and he saw all 3 clips, too. he has also a few connections to the event-management, they confirmed the avatar clips as promotion for a company which works together with panasonic.

This could be the clip we have been waiting for guys! I know there were clips shown in Nuremberg, Germany at the Toy Fair so this makes a lot of sense. CeBit is in Hannover. Keep it here for more updates!

Hi everyone, Michael here. A few months ago, G@BRIEL GR@Y dropped into a discussion here on MarketSaw, where he described what he considered to be the standout visual effects set piece of Avatar: a 12 minute sequence seen through the eyes of Jake in Avatar form as, among other things, he runs through the Pandoran jungle. Now, I have heard from a completely different source, who I can confirm as legit, that there is indeed a first person set piece in the film.

First, here is what G@BRIEL GR@Y had to say a few months ago:

There is a twelve min segment entirely in the first person viewpoint. this as im sure you all could understand is a tricky thing, you`ve seen examples in doom. which look cool....but never felt real. for instance blinking blurring of vision. photoreal is now easy. animateing it to define real is very hard. this most definatly is the money shot of the biggest movie ever conceived.

G@BRIEL GR@Y also posted the following on ComingSoon.net (as reported by MarketSaw reader Darkoo):

I was told about a 12 min segment of avatar where its in the first person viewpoint.and they were having probs making the scene feel real because people blink and have blurred vision. and from what im told they have found a very interesting compromise.

Here is what my source, who spoke to someone who had seen parts of the sequence, had to say to me a couple days ago:

1) He said that 'when you are running through the jungle of Pandora and their tails are moving in front of your face, your brain will melt.'

2) I asked whether it a return to Tech-Noir form from JC and he said 'its like Aliens, but from the POV of the Aliens' :)

3) Big Rock Candy Mountain is supposed to be 'amazing.'

4) Slightly off topic, the BAA preprod at Lightstorm was 'very much in line with Kishiro's artwork.' Imagine that in 3D? /brain melts

So G@BRIEL GR@Y's report is almost certainly legit, which is very exciting. The concept of Avatar is very much about letting go of the confines of your body, and experiencing the world through a different set of eyes. I think this sequence will be an incredible way of driving this point home. And, yes, it will certainly be brain-meltingly cool. It will be fascinating to watch Battle Angel continue to develop, too. Mark Goerner's interview shed some fascinating light on the huge amount of work that has gone into that project so far. I can't wait to see where it goes from here.