Lots of Avatars: The way of water’s rubbing-your-eyes-in-disbelief charm stems from its ability to convincingly blur the practical and digital—and the animators at Wētā FX did such a good job in that department that director James Cameron was often fooled into Approval of fully computer-generated footage.
In an exclusive interview with TechRadar, Daniel Barrett, chief animator at the New Zealand visual effects company, revealed that he and his team sometimes had to sidestep Cameron’s desire to keep things as practical as possible in order to keep some of the shots realistic.
“There is a lot of interaction between [Na’vi] characters and spider [played by Jack Champion] In his book, The Way of Water, Barrett explains, getting the kind of connection accuracy you need on stereoscopic film can be a real challenge. The plotting on set was done to such a high level that many of those shots worked. But there were times, too [when they didn’t].
If you think about those shots where Quaritch is carrying Spider into the drop zone – it was all practically shot, but we quickly realized there were elements of Jack’s body that we needed to replace with digital ones to make sure we could get all that connection done. Digital doubles arrived. We have to a really high level. We had a lot of situations in the movie where Jim cheated on us [Cameron] — where he thought we were pragmatic, and we were really digital.
We’ll make the decision: What’s the path of least resistance to get Jim back on the plate just as he fired it? Sometimes the savings are too great to go digital. […] But clearly there is still much work to be done. For the camera team to be able to create encounters precise enough to be superimposed into 3D movies, there is a real challenge involved. And they’ve done a great job on this movie reconciling some of those situations for us.”
Animation 101 with Wētā FX
As someone whose team was “responsible for pretty much everything that moves” in The Way of Water, Barrett is among the few people who can provide an informed answer to the question: How did Cameron pull off this?
If you’ve watched any of the film’s behind-the-scenes features, you’ll know that the processes involved in bringing the fictional world of Pandora completely to life on screen must be mind-bogglingly complex. So, naturally, we asked Barrett to explain — in layman’s terms — how Wētā turned the likes of Kate Winslet and Cliff Curtis into 10-foot-tall Navi.
“The way we split it up,” he begins, “There were certain teams for certain sequences, but we also had our own dedicated artists. So, for example, we have a facial team, which has done the lion’s share of the facial work, and they sit as a separate department. We have an editing team. The motion whose starting point is the performance capture data–they obviously did quite a bit of work on this movie.Then we have the animation team, who do a little bit of everything–they’re in charge of all the creatures and the vehicles and things like that.And we also have a crowd team He deals with the larger crowd [animations]Whether it’s fish, birds, or a village congregate. All those groups of people, in those sections of what we call the world of movement, totaled about 150 at our peak.
Your facial animation will fall flat if you don’t have a very accurate copy of the performance.
Daniel Barrett, Wētā FX
So motion capture was done — the bulk of that was done in Lightstorm [studios] – And [the footage] Then Jim picks it up, whatever he likes,” Barrett continues. “Then it’s handed over to Weta, where it comes through the motion capture team. Data is tracked in Lightstorm, but we like to re-track it to make sure we’re keeping performance accurate and detailed. That would then pass on to the motion editing team, who would start working on the bodies – sometimes there’s a little bit of cleanup involved with that. [stage]. The motion editing team—sometimes also the animation team—will handle the bits and pieces you can’t catch,” Barrett explains, giving Na’vi fingers and tails as examples.
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“We love that the bodyshop is pretty much done before we move on to the facials — and on that note, there’s a great deal of interest in what the head does, because the animation of your face will fall apart if you don’t have a much more accurate copy of the performance. Once it’s done So, we move on to the facial treatment [animations] – Although sometimes, if we realize that we have lost something in our head, we have to push it back one step. This is very much the process of performance recording, [with regards] movement team.
Barrett adds, “There’s obviously a lot of work done up front in terms of modeling, character rigging, shading and textures. But once the action comes into play, the shots run through the creature team mimicking the canvas, the costumes, the hair. And then of course we have a very clever lighting team that works their magic, Which is always great. To see these characters finally introduced… Oh, it’s just a thrill. To work on something that looks a little cartoonish and then see something that looks like the real thing. It’s such a joy, such a gift.”
Judging by The Way of Water’s nearly $2 billion global box office revenue, audiences are in for a treat, too.
Avatar: The Way of Water is now playing in theaters around the world.