This interview with “Avatar: The Way of Water” visual effects supervisors Richard Baneham and Eric Saindon and Weta FX director Joe Letteri first appeared in a special section of the Below-the-Line issue of The Wrap Awards.
When James Cameron began working on the story for “Avatar: The Way of Water” and subsequent sequels in the early 2010s, his visual effects team began writing their own way forward. “At the time, it was mostly functional technical questions: how do we build a system that Jim could use live?” said visual effects supervisor Richard Baneham, adding that testing on the new systems didn’t begin until 2016. “This stems from Jim’s desire to treat the digital world and the real world in the same way,” added the Weta director. FX, Joe Letteri. “He wanted to use the camera like a real camera, see his actors, see the lighting, artfully direct the shots, move sets and dress. This was the core of building all of that together. And it paid off because he moved on to filming live action.”
Among the many breakthroughs the team achieved was a way to do deep compositing and moving eye-line systems that were integrated while filming the live-action portions of “Avatar: The Way of Water.”
“When you’re compositing, the old way to do it was layering,” Letteri said. “But if you imagine a character walking around a tree within a single shot, one moment he’s in front of it and another moment he’s behind it. We created a neural network to train for what we were shooting.”
While every shot in “Avatar: The Way of Water” is a significant achievement (everyone agrees that the facial renderings were the big, subtle breakthrough), one shot in particular had Twitter losing its collective mind trying to figure out how. the VFX team did it. It’s a shot in which Jake Sully ties a leather thong around his wrist as he sits on a dolphin-like creature called an ilu.
As it turned out, it was a strange mix of live-action plate photography and complex visual effects work. “Some of it was an actor with blue hands doing the leather chop on a deer in the water,” Letteri said. “And then we did a lot of rotoscoping and recreated the water to fit back around the hands. We did three shots like that. One of them was CG and two had live action elements.
“We actually shot that in a wading pool,” said visual effects supervisor Eric Saindon. “And what we ended up using was in the middle where everyone was guessing. We replaced the arm and the body and had to place an illustration there. The reality falls between the Reddit conversation and the recent articles saying it was all live action.”
Like any good magic trick, this one is impossible to crack.
Read more of the issue below the line here.
