On his award winning 2009 film, Avatar, James Cameron was asked by Time magazine in an interview what the term ‘Avatar’ meant, to which he replied, “It’s an incarnation of one of the Hindu gods taking a flesh form”. With respect to the film Cameron went further to say, “the necessary technology was not yet available to achieve my vision of the film”.
However for this piece, I will take an avatar as somebody who embodies an idea or concept.
My inspiration for this article came, not from the film itself but from the creative concepts behind the scenes; the cinematography, culture and language development for the film’s aliens, the Na’vi and the whole idea that made it a huge success. It taught me how a man could think years ahead of technology such that a film that would have been released in 1999 had to wait till 2009.
Like James who also wrote the famed 1997 film, Titanic, I’ve met a lot of creative young people. I like to call them ‘Idea Banks’; those with ‘crazy’ ideas that will ‘shake the earth’, ‘head-smoking’ imaginations that can light up the entire world at a snap of a finger, and heart-melting visions that could melt down a pillar of salt in a split second. These are the people I call Avatars.
Now, we have so many Avatars but very few of these creative geniuses have actually mastered the art of thinking through their ideas. A wise man rightly said “A vision is not just a picture of what could be, but a call from within to become something more” and I add “to become something more, one must first understand the vision then grow it from within”.
As simple as that may sound, it requires a lot of thinking which a great number of us are incapable of which gives rise to quite a number of unfinished individual projects – Dreams lost in translation.
Ideas require time and attention. We have to be systematic in the development of our creative ideas and not just jump into ‘space’ at the snap of an idea and start circling in confusion.
What to do
Here’s a thought that may help: when an idea hits you, instead of going around telling everybody how powerful it is, first sit with it, think it through, research it as much as you can, understand it thoroughly and come out with the pros and cons. If J. Cameron’s idea took ten years to gain traction, it tells me powerful ideas are worth investing time and energy on and patiently and actively taking the required steps to bring it to fruition. We all know Avatar was a huge box office success.
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