‘It’s Designing an Entire Universe’
This interview with the “Avatar: The Way of Water” production designers first appeared in the Below-the-Line Issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
On paper, the production design of “Avatar: The Way of Water” seems as if it would be an enormous undertaking. However, Ben Procter, the production designer for “Avatar: The Way of Water,” immediately raises the stakes when he begins to talk about the specific challenges that the job presents.
“It’s not a production-design job where you’re designing a film,” he said. “This is a bigger project. It’s 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 began on the first film, but it increased exponentially on “The Way of Water,” which explores huge new areas on the planet Pandora. “We had to create a guidebook for the ecosystem,” supervising art director Aashrita Kamath said. “The script might have a description of a creature, but in terms of the ecosystem, we had to figure out which creatures played nicely together and which ones didn’t.”
Also, read:
‘Avatar 2’ Nears $900 Million Worldwide as ‘Babylon’ Bombs at Holiday Box Office
Vanessa Cole, set decorator, said that she delivered 63 sets for the production. These included vehicles, laboratories and sets that were used in the first film. “We fabricated an awful lot of furniture and contacted scientists and laboratories in New Zealand to put some facts and credibility behind them,” she said. “But there were legacy pieces we refurbished as well. It was nice to bring the past into the present.”
The majority of the designs were CG-oriented and existed only in virtual form. They were added by the actors after they had completed their motion-capture work. Dylan Cole, production designer, points out the Metkayina home where Jake Sully and his families stay. It is home to a tribe who lives in hammock-like, woven structures right by the ocean.
“It’s one of the coolest things we made, and we actually built it as a one-sixth scale miniature,” he said. “It was a research exercise as much as anything, but it was scanned by Weta FX for the final model. It was indeed woven. We had amazing New Zealand weavers doing traditional techniques to work on that thing.”
The Sea Dragon, an enormous armored vessel that an expedition from a dying Earth uses for hunting down Sully and attacking the Metkayina people, was considerably less organic. “It was the absolute hardest, largest problem to solve,” Procter said. “It’s gotta look menacing, so it kind of feels like a manta ray.
“But then you have 60 different story points that involve geographical relationships and eyelines. As you can guess, the tactical and logistical details were unbelievably difficult to figure out.”
RFind out more in the Below-the-Line magazine here.
