Maxance Vincent
It would be fair to say that the Avatar franchise has crafted some of the most staggering visual effects ever put to screen. While the first two films saw director James Cameron introduce a brand-new, never-before-seen world to audiences and enhance the art of performance capture in ways few had imagined, the third entry in the series,Avatar: Fire and Ash, begins to experiment artistically with Pandora.
This, of course, creates different challenges as Cameron takes his story in various directions that are often unexpected and, in some cases, “out-there,” but the Visual Effects team is always up to the task of working with whatever the filmmaker throws at them.
The Wētā FX crew has now received yet another Academy Award nomination for their work on Avatar: Fire and Ash, and continues to raise the bar in employing visual effects to help Cameron tell the ambitious stories set within Pandora.
Discussing the accolades that Fire and Ash has so far received, VFX Supervisor Eric Saindon describes, to Awards Radar on Zoom, that it’s always a great feeling for the team to have their work recognized and awarded at the scale it has been received:
“You never know how the world is going to take it. You work on it for all that time, so you never know what to expect from audiences when they see it. You can always go into it saying, “It’s going to be a great movie. Everyone’s going to love it,” but you just never know.”
Adding to this, animation supervisor Daniel Barrett states that “it’s a rare treat to do a film like The Way of Water and then roll straight into the next one. We learned so much in The Way of Water that we were on a roll at the beginning of Fire and Ash to fix some things we wanted to fix.”
Of course, a discussion on the ambitious visual effects of Avatar: Fire and Ash is wide-ranging, and we were able, in 30 minutes, to discuss Wētā FX’s continued collaboration with James Cameron, the design of some of the film’s most trippy sequences, how they worked with actors in performance capture, and the importance of leaving no stone unturned in the smallest details of Pandora’s environment.
Listen to the full conversation with Eric Saindon and Daniel Barrett below:
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