This interview with the production designers of “Avatar: The Way of Water” first appeared in the Below-the-Line issue of awards magazine TheWrap.
On paper, the production design for “Avatar: The Way of Water” seems like a huge undertaking. But as soon as he starts talking about the particular challenges of the job, production designer Ben Procter ups the ante.
“It’s not a production design job where you’re designing a movie,” he said. “This is a bigger project. It is designing an entire universe. It’s making a real world that is coherent and makes sense that is rooted in real science and real engineering.”
That world-building started in the first movie, but it ramped up exponentially in “The Way of Water,” which explores huge new areas on the planet Pandora. “We had to create a guide for the ecosystem,” said supervising art director Aashrita Kamath. “The script could have a description of a creature, but in terms of the ecosystem, we had to figure out which creatures got along and which ones didn’t.”
Set decorator Vanessa Cole said she delivered 63 sets to the production, from vehicles to laboratories to sets that had been used in the first film. “We made a lot of furniture and contacted scientists and labs in New Zealand to back them up with some facts and credibility,” she said. “But there were also legacy pieces that we restored. It was nice to bring the past to the present.”
Most of the designs were CG oriented, existing only virtually, and were added after the actors had done their work on the motion capture sets. But production designer Dylan Cole proudly points to the house where Jake Sully and his family are staying in the town of Metkayina, home to a tribe that lives in woven hammock-like structures by the sea.
“It’s one of the best things we’ve ever done, and we actually built it as a one-sixth scale model,” he said. “It was more of a research exercise than anything, but Weta FX scanned it for the final model. And it was legitimate tissue. We had amazing New Zealand weavers apply traditional techniques to work on that thing.”
Considerably less organic was the Sea Dragon, the massive armored ship that an expedition from a dying Earth uses to hunt down Sully and attack the people of Metkayina. “It was the biggest and most difficult problem to solve,” Procter said. “It has to look menacing, so it feels like a manta ray.
“But then you have 60 different story points involving geographic relationships and lines of sight. As you can guess, the tactical and logistical details were incredibly difficult to understand.”
R.read more of the issue below the line here.
