6 days ago
17
James Cameron’s “Avatar: Fire and Ash” is one of the most ambitious visual effects films ever made, a movie that used over 140 petabytes (140,000 terabytes) of disk space and employed well over a thousand personnel assigned to the effects. In a 197-minute movie, there are only 11 shots — around seven seconds of film — that don’t include any visual effects.
For executive producer and visual effects supervisor Richard Baneham, tackling a project of such immense scale was made possible by the nature of the collaboration that developed over the course of nearly 20 years of working on “Avatar” movies with Cameron and the numerous effects supervisors who split up the work.
“There’s an implicit trust that happens when you have [supervisors] who have been on the show for a long time and have a relationship with Jim and they understand the work,” Baneham told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “We have guys that are coming up on 18 years — not straight, we did have a break between [‘Avatar’] and [‘The Way of Water’], but they were all active on ‘Avatar’ and learned the process.”
That process involves the visual effects department working in close collaboration with production designers Dylan Cole and Ben Procter, costume designer Deborah L. Scott (who, like Baneham and the rest of the visual effects team, is nominated for an Oscar for her work on “Fire and Ash”), and other department heads to create real-word references for the digitally created world that comprises the finished film.
+Even elements that aren’t built on the stage are developed in the computer in a way that shows the visual effects artists how things would organically evolve in the fantasy setting of Pandora.
“Even with the forest, we create a lot of growth as if it were on earth,” visual effects supervisor Eric Saindon, who is in charge of the work by Wētā FX, said on Toolkit. “We use software to basically plant a plant and then let it grow, have the trees grow higher around it, and have it go through a whole life cycle. It’s all in the computer, but it’s to try to lay out the plants in a way that makes sense, with the dead leaves and all the other extra things. It’s a crazy amount of detail to go into, but it makes a huge difference when audiences are watching.”
All of the elements that play a large role in the “Avatar” movies — particularly fire and water — are carefully grounded in the real world. “The molecular makeup of water and its behavior should be the same here as it is on Pandora,” Baneham said, with Saindon adding that he did a lot of work with flamethrowers to study fire and the way it moved through space. “Whenever we can ground the CG world in the live action world, it’s going to help audiences understand where they are,” Saindon said.
That meant finding terrestrial references for completely invented characters like the Ilu, a sea creature that Na’vi (and, in the case of Spider, humans) can ride. “It’s how they feed, how they hunt, how they mate, where they live, what they eat,” Baneham said. “A terrestrial reference will give you everything that you want there and you can start to find parallels.” In scenes like one in which Spider (Jack Champion) and Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) ride an Ilu, the work was made more complicated by needing to combine a human actor with the digital creature and costar.
“You can’t tell which shots are CG and which ones are live action, which is the whole goal,” Saindon said. “But that was a monster challenge, getting those shots to work.” According to Baneham, scenes like this are where investing in practical references really pays off. “We had actors in blue suits in the water so that you’re not pantomiming, you’re dealing with real forces that change direction because the interaction is actually there. Bringing that to fruition on screen then becomes both easier and harder — easier in the sense that the credibility is already there, and harder because the integration is so specific.”
“Because we had Jack in a pool we built, we knew exactly what the reference was,” Saindon said, noting that Champion interacted with a puppet designed to represent the Ilu. “We put LED screens on the backside of the pool so we could reflect the village into the water, and we knew what the water did coming off of his arms and how it interacted with the Ilu that was puppeteered. So we had a really great reference for what we needed to do, and then we kept as much as we possibly could. In some cases you have to change stuff, like when you replace the Ilu underwater you have to replace a leg or something, but we knew that it would be easy enough to match.”
For Baneham, the key was working out the creature’s behavior well ahead of time so that the Ilu would feel like a fully realized being and not just a figment of an artist’s imagination. “You work out the vocabulary of the creature,” Baneham said. “The personality of the Ilu is important to us, the idea that it’s not just something you jump on; it’s like a hybrid of the personality of a dog and the utilitarian value of a horse. How do you marry those ideas? It’s not just a big lumbering log that that you sit on. Making him feel like a real character in the scene is incredibly important to Jim.”
Solving the myriad problems on “Avatar: Fire and Ash” required, as Baneham said, “hybrids of old techniques and new techniques. Some of it’s engineering, some of it is writing aspirational ideas, and sometimes it’s a matter of getting in the trenches and fucking it up sometimes.” Indeed, making mistakes is not just a byproduct of pushing the limits of current technology as Cameron does every time he makes a movie, it’s an essential part of the process. “We had one time on stage where things weren’t going great. Everybody’s on edge, and Jim says, ‘Lads, I just want to say something. You’re making history when you’re fucking up so much.'”
Baneham describes the “Avatar” movies as “the biggest guerrilla-style movies ever made” given the team’s ability to solve problems on the fly. “There’s not this big lumbering machine,” he said. “You’re figuring it out as you go: what are the parameters of the problem and how do you solve it? You just start with that and work backwards.”
Saindon points out that throughout the process the “Avatar” filmmakers are constantly developing new technology to achieve Cameron’s goals. “It allows us to make these movies more streamlined,” Saindon said. “I was going to say easier, but it’s never easy. It’s a lot of data to manage, and we’re always building new tech to make it better because audiences get smarter every year. They expect more so you always have to be pushing the technology. If you’re not, then you’re dead in the water.”
“Avatar: Fire and Ash” is currently in theaters. To hear the entire conversation with Richard Baneham and Eric Saindon and make sure you don’t miss a single episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
English (US) ·