this interview with “Avatar: The Way of Water” editor Stephen Rivkin, first appeared as part of a feature section in the Below-the-Line issue of awards magazine TheWrap.
Battling the 192-minute runtime of “The Way of Water” was a Herculean task that required a small army of editors and a process unique to the Avatar ecosystem. “As we did on the first ‘Avatar,’ work is divided out of necessity due to the complexity of the filmmaking process,” said Stephen Rivkin, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work on the first film.
“Editors will take scenes from going through daily performance capture with Jim and creating a performance-based edit to creating what we call uploads, which are files for sections of each scene that will be processed in our internal labs. and prepared for virtual photography. And then the photography phase, where we work with shots that Jim creates that will make up the final edit of a scene.”
Unlike the typical editors who come in after a movie has been shot, Rivkin and the rest of the editors were there from the start. “Like the first movie, this movie was a patchwork of scenes in various stages of production and post-production,” he said. The “performance-based edit,” for example, doesn’t look anything like the finished movie. It consists primarily of actors whose motion-captured performances will be turned into digital characters. The editors worked on the scenes months, sometimes years, after the actors had captured the scenes.
“There are no more limitations on the actors hitting the mark or saying their lines,” Rivkin said. “It frees up Jim to explore whatever he wants to do.”
Once most of the scenes are finished, they are sent to Weta FX, where animators and technicians work on the shots, sometimes for years, preparing them for the final film. When the footage finally returns to Rivkin, it’s like looking at a completely different project. “Watching these original renderings we created years ago come to life in fully rendered faces and eyes, it’s amazing to see the evolution from capture to final rendering,” Rivkin said.
When asked if there was a particularly challenging sequence, Rivkin said that “every sequence is at the highest level of difficulty.” But one aspect of “Avatar: The Way of Water” proved problematic.
“The integration of live-action characters with virtual characters was something that added an extra layer of challenge to this project,” he said, referring to the characters played by Edie Falco and Jack Champion. “All the live-action characters that were in scenes with virtual characters were first captured as virtual characters. We could design a sequence with representatives of those characters and that would be the template for going back and shooting the action live. It was a very complicated process.”
Read more on the subject Below the line here.
