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Never known for his humility, director James “King of the World” Cameron describes his upcoming 3-D movie Avatar as “the single most complex piece of filmmaking ever made.”

The $200 million project is being produced mainly in New Zealand, with Weta Digital handling the effects. Cameron claims Avatar will out-do, in sheer quantity, the digital character work pioneered by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. “We have 1,600 shots for a two-and-a-half hour movie,” Cameron told Microsoft Advance 08 conference attendees. “It’s not with a single CGI character, like King Kong or Gollum. We have hundreds of photorealistic CG characters.”

Cameron told the crowd Tuesday: “One more layer of the suspension of disbelief will be removed,” according to SearchEngineWatch. “Now that we’ve achieved it, we discovered CG characters in 3-D look more real than in 2-D. Your brain is cued: ‘It’s a real thing not a picture’ –- and discounts the part of [the] image that makes it look fake.”

Rumor has it that the syn-thespians in Cameron’s movie, set for release in December 2009, play aliens or avatars, not humans. That should help the cause. As the 2001 fizzle Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within proved, moviegoers are unforgiving when it comes to judging the verisimilitude of their own species.

via FirstShowing.net