Avatar: The Way of Water Crosses $2B and Earns Oscar Nominations

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After years of skeptics questioning the unique “Avatar’s” cultural footprint – and whether or not anyone could actually remember the names of any characters – filmmaker James Cameron seems to have at the least temporarily silenced his many haters. His massively-budgeted long-awaited sci-fi sequel “Avatar: The Way of Water” crossed the $2 billion mark at the worldwide box office this week, making it the sixth highest-grossing film in history. As if that weren’t achievement enough, the film has now been nominated for 4 Oscars, including Production Design, Sound, Visual Effects and Best Picture.

About That “Cultural Footprint”…

Competition on this 12 months’s technical categories, including VFX, is especially fierce. “Avatar 2” will face off for the Visual Effects prize against Netflix’s “All Quiet on the Western Front,” WB’s “The Batman,” and Disney-Marvel’s “Black Panther: Wakanda Eternally,” but faces perhaps its strongest competition from 2022’s other mega-blockbuster: Paramount’s “Top Gun: Maverick.” (For all that film’s
marketing around shooting practically in real fighter jets, it comprises 2,400 VFX shots!)

While Academy voters take every kind of things into consideration when voting, Cameron’s film arguably represents the most important overall step forward when it comes to latest film technology, employing quite a lot of
progressive solutions to bringing the distant and exotic planet of Pandora to fully-realized three-dimensional life. The unique 2009 “Avatar” starred a solid of nine-foot-tall blue aliens running around a bioluminescent forest on an alien world, so it was already a fairly significant step forward when it comes to cinematic visuals. Nonetheless, the sequel posed an extra massive challenge that’s right there within the subtitle: “The Way of WATER.”

Under the (Virtual) Sea

Traditionally, big-budget VFX-heavy Hollywood movies with
underwater sequences shoot what’s called “dry for wet.” That’s, the production stays on dry land, which is way easier on all of the technology, and just use bluescreen backdrops together with wires to make it appear to be the actors and props are suspended beneath the waves. Cameron tried a couple of traditional wire-motion tests but ultimately concluded that it just wasn’t realistic enough for his movie.

As a substitute, Cameron worked with Australian cinematographer Pawel Achtel, who developed his own underwater camera rig generally known as
DeepX 3D in 2015. This rig was then paired with underwater Nikon lenses from the Nineteen Eighties, creating the one known camera system able to capturing stereoscopic 3D while shooting underwater. Notably, the rig can be relatively light – weighing around 66 kilos – making it relatively maneuverable compared to traditional camera systems.

The actors filmed their underwater sequences in
a 900,000-gallon tank, requiring them to master free diving and breath control. Motion sequences were sometimes shot in a 250,000-gallon tank outfitted with a wave simulator that also captured coordinated shots each above and below the water line.

Putting It All Together

In a GQ profile – released as a part of their “Men of the Yr 2022” coverage – Cameron briefly discussed the general process for assembling an “Avatar” film. First, he shoots what’s generally known as a “template,” a data-rich collection of visuals that captures the fundamental visual elements of a scene, including performances from human actors, lighting and camera movement. While shooting these sequences, the actors are wearing performance-capture suits covered in sensors to trace their movement.

For “Avatar 2,” Cameron also employed additional facial cameras to capture tiny nuances of the actor’s expressions, giving the animators intricate details to translate to their alien Na’vi characters.

This template was then handed off to technicians, animators, and other creatives at Wētā FX – the Latest Zealand visual effects studio founded by Peter Jackson that designed his “Lord of the Rings” and “Hobbit” movies – who added animated elements on top of the raw footage. That is significantly different from the type of work effects artists would do on a wholly animated film of the type released by DreamWorks or Pixar. As Cameron explained “the actors already defined what they did, however it must be translated from the captured data to the 3D-CG character.”

Animation and Automation

A part of the animation process was automated using a posh network of algorithms, largely to save lots of time. While the unique “Avatar” was—based on Cameron’s estimates— around
70-75% computer-generated, the brand new film is closer to 90% animation. One such technique uses flow maps to configure the layout of pores on characters’ faces. Others were required for realistically animating various water effects, making individual splashes and sprays look photorealistic and natural. Effects supervisor Eric Saindon estimates that there are 1,600 different water simulations visible within the finished film.

These sorts of digital shortcuts and tools are essential when you concentrate on the sheer amount of labor required to bring Pandora to fully-realied life on screen. In accordance with Wētā artists,
57 latest species of sea creature alone were created exclusively for the film. The corporate worked on 3,240 visual effects shots total, 2,225 of which included water.

Cameron’s VFX supervisors Joe Letteri and Richard Baneham also reimagined and upgraded the
performance capture technology they’d developed for the unique “Avatar,” generally known as FACS, or Facial Motion Coding System. The brand new system utilizes a neural network that’s been trained on muscle movements within the human face, with specific attention to the ways in which muscle, tissue, and skin move around each other.

Just Rig Things

Then, after all, there have been the needed camera upgrades. Cameron and his team famously designed
a latest “virtual” camera rig for the primary “Avatar,” allowing him to visualise actors within the animated setting of Pandora while still on set. Never one to be outdone, Cameron developed a wholly latest camera system for “Avatar 2” and its future sequels, incorporating multiple Sony Venice cameras into 3D stereoscopic rigs, able to capturing images in vibrant 6K. When accompanied by cutting-edge lighting units and other latest technologies, the total rig is able to functionally simulating performance capture live to tell the tale set, allowing the director to accurately visualize how the finished film will look while shooting just the physical elements.

All of this digital work required some mega-computing power behind the scenes as well. Shots containing a lot of intricate water-based effects could require weeks for Wētā’s computers to completely process. Rendering the finished film required hundreds of thousands of processor hours to finish. In accordance with
The Latest York Times, the entire amount of knowledge produced for “Avatar: The Way of Water” tops out at around 18.5 petabytes, in comparison with just 1 petabyte for the primary movie. – Lon Harris