Avatar: Fire and Ash tops $1 billion at the international box office this weekend, days after James Cameron’s blockbuster was nominated for Best Visual Effects at the Oscars. Yesterday I shared part 1 of my interview with Wētā FX team VFX Supervisor Eric Saindon and Animation Supervisor Daniel Barrett. Today brings part 2 of our discussion.
Oona Chaplin and Stephen Lang star in “Avatar: Fire and Ash.”
Source: Disney
Avatar: Fire and Ash – By The Numbers
Avatar: Fire and Ash is headed for a $7 million domestic cume this weekend, while international sales top $1 billion, only the fifteenth film in history to cross that overseas threshold.
Avatar: Fire and Ash should finish its run somewhere around $1.5 billion worldwide. I’ve previously explained why that figure is lower than expected, but still objectively a great result with several factors contributing to suppressing ticket sales (especially in Asia Pacific), so I won’t dive into that again. But it’s true, and it would be crazy to cancel future sequels.
The other contenders for the VFX Oscar are F1, Jurassic World: Rebirth, The Lost Bus, and Sinners. The previous two Avatar movies won Oscars for their effects. But this is a unique year in a lot of ways, so there could be a challenge from The Lost Bus in particular.
Avatar: Fire and Ash – The Interview
Here is the second part of my three-part interview with Wētā VFX Supervisor Eric Saindon and Animation Supervisor Daniel Barrett, in which we dive into what it was like working with James Cameron, the ways the water informed fire, and the sheer scale of what the franchise is accomplishing.
MH: The size of the team on this… there’s no other films equivalent to this. I mean, all praise to Star Wars and Avengers movies, but nothing is like this. It’s all just so intense and you have to be working at 100% every minute on everything… Like if you’ve done that, you can do anything, it seems to me from looking at the results. I was thinking everyone on this team could go out and start their own visual effects company, experience wise.
ES: Don’t tell them that! [Laughing]
MH: Roger Ebert said of Avatar that you see every penny on the screen. Every investment. This is what endless ambition looks like, when it’s successful and has everything it needs to achieve its goal. And then, it just hits every time now.
DB: Yeah, but that’s a lot of that’s down to Jim, right? Like he has this ambition and this vision for what he wants, and he’s a clever enough guy to know that in order to bring that to screen, you need to be incredibly well organized. You need to plan.
So it’s such a gratifying thing to work for him. Because I’ve said it in the past, I literally use the term that you’ve used, where as an artist working on something where you know that every bit of money that came into the facility is now there up on the screen is so satisfying. Because all too often you’re working stuff out, you’re trying things and it’s not working, you know, or someone’s not clear on their idea so we’re going to throw that away. And with Jim, he sets us up to succeed, and for us to always be moving forward.
So, yeah, it’s a really great experience, and, you know, I want the work that I’m involved with to look as good as it possibly can, and he gives you that chance. Jim gives you that chance.
MH: It’s got to be remarkable to work with a filmmaker who famously started in visual effects.. [for example] Battle Beyond the Stars looks [great]. I mean, watching that movie, still today you can look at it and be like, “He made magic, and he had almost nothing to work with.” And of course, the first Terminator, he was always innovating like that and visual effects was where he got his start and where he came from. Can you talk about the difference between working with someone who has that background, compared to filmmakers who [don’t]? I imagine an extremely different experience. [See Forbes recent report on Cameron’s personal success here.]
ES: It’s 100% different. Because working with Jim every day, you learn something every day, you learn why he overlaps motion by four frames per shot, why he’s puts your eye in a certain place on frame, and then when the next shot comes up your eye needs to be in the same place.
It’s all the little things you learn every day working with him as a filmmaker and the way he explains it to you along the way. Like he doesn’t just say, make it this way. He says, like, “I want it to go this way because I’m telling this part of the story, and that’s why this shot is important for this.” So he’s very good at explaining exactly why things should be a certain way.
And that makes him very, very different than a lot of other directors, because a lot of other directors, they’ll look at a shot and they’ll go, “Yeah, this looks like shit. But I don’t know why. So just show me 10 other things.” And we’ve all worked with directors like that. And you end up doing wedges upon wedges with different color, different lighting, different this, different that, just to show them 10 different things, for them to react to something that might work.
Jim doesn’t do that. He tells you, “I want this, and I think it should be this time of day, and I want this, this, and this.” And you try that 1st and sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, you show them the why it doesn’t work and you say, hey, what if we try this? Or what if we go this direction? He’s more than happy to listen to that.
And if he looks at a shot and he goes, “The shot doesn’t look right. But I don’t know why, and I can’t give you a reason,” he’ll say, “So I guess it’s done,” and he’ll go think about it. He’ll usually think about it for another week after that, and then he’ll come back and he’ll say, “Okay, now I know why I didn’t like that shot. And have a solution for it.” Or he’ll have edited it and cut it shorter, or remove the shot completely if it really bugged him.
So it’s just a really different way of working. And it’s across every discipline, right? It’s not just visual effects, because he understands visual effects better than most of the visual effects supes [supervisors] on the movie.
I mean, that’s not to take anything away from any of the visual effects on the supes on the movie. But he understands them just as well. He might not know the buttons to press to make them, but he understands them just as well.
But it’s also, he understands sound as well as any of the sound editors. He knows editing as well as the editors, grading all those, it’s every discipline.
And it’s frustrating sometimes when award season comes out and Jim sort of always gets ignored with Avatar movies, because I think people after the first Avatar, they expect him to be at a certain bar and to be crossing way above that bar every time. But at a certain stage, that bar is real hard to cross. So I don’t think he gets the credit he deserves for the level of work he does as a director.
DB: No, I don’t think there are many people around, right, that could do what Jim does. Very, very few could do what he does, in the way that he does it, to the budget that he manages to stick to, and then what he brings to screen.
Like, I’ve always said that he’s almost certainly a better animator than I am. You know, don’t know if he’s ever animated, but give him a day on the machine, show him a few tools, I reckon he’d be doing better than I do.
I mean, it’s a word that gets thrown around a lot, but he’s a filmmaking genius. He understands all of it. And it’s just such a great place to be, such a great place to work. He speaks the language of the visual effects artists. He doesn’t mess you around. And I think that that’s why people love it.
You know, people love everything they do. Every key frame, every light they point being a step forward and a step towards the final goal, rather than what you get sometimes, which is chasing your tail for six weeks before you put out something you know is nowhere near good enough because we didn’t have the time.
MH: The Way of Water… every individual shot was Oscar-worthy, it was mind-blowing, what you’ve done with that, and how you’ve incorporated and worked the water and CGI in together and the inability to tell the difference.
And this film is the first one with fire. I mean, we had the fire with the forest burning and things in individual scenes or moments, but [in Fire and Ash] fire was part of the story and realistic fire was particularly important, not just visually but thematically. It was a whole different visual look to the film.
I don’t know enough about the technology to know if figuring out the water was like, that suddenly made fire so much better… now it just looks as real as everything else?
ES: A lot of that is, for The Way of Water we built a new effects module called Loki, and it allows us to control all our effects with things like, you could plug in fuel, you can plug in environmental conditions, you can plug in all of those different elements. And then we can we can write another solver on top of that, for all the different things we do on top of it.
Like for water, we wrote a water solver for the last movie that allowed us to do Bulk Sims, which is like the big splashes, the initial splash you get when something goes into the water. And then on top of that, another element to do the spray that comes off that.
So as the big splash breaks down, it atomizes into spray, and then into mist, and then to just vapor. We can write different solvers for all of those different elements, so that they all work together and they all interact properly. And that’s really how the water became what it did.
And in this film, we even added to that, for scenes like where the kids are going down the rapids, because we had two or three plates of Spider in the water that we shot in Manhattan Beach in the pool. We had to match our water to that water, our CG water. And the thing we found was, bubbles were the hardest thing to match, like the hero bubbles that actually go down the stream or down the river and break up and then recombine, and they do all the weird things bubbles do. So we had to write a new solver for that for this movie, to be able to understand the river and make the river match.
So when you watch those scenes, there’s two shots that are live action, and the rest of them are all CG, and hopefully you can’t tell which ones are.
MH: Oh my god, really? I debated that with another writer who insisted [in The Way of Water] that a scene was all real water and just the characters were CG, the entire sequence. And I told them that [it was CG water] and they didn’t believe it. And I was like, no, half the stuff you saw in the last movie that you thought was real was CG too.
ES: Yeah, like the wide shots, and the quick rapid shots, there’s two live action shots and the live action shots had to be extended, because we had to add the environment around it and all the other things. So we had to match our water to the live action water and make the two work together.
And then you run into that whole stereo issue again, where they have to work together and be in the same space. So it’s a whole– it all unwinds itself very easy if you screw up one thing…
ES: And then fire was the same thing, right? Like in the last film, we had some fire. We had some campfires and we had a couple of flamethrowers, but they weren’t really the focus of the movie.
This movie, we had much, much bigger fire, especially like when the ships get blown up. But the weird thing is, we needed real fire, we needed big fire. So we had to get the scale and the fuel and all those things right.
But it also had to be directable, because it had to do certain things. Like, it had to explode off the ship and then swirl up, and then go into the flux vortex for those really pretty shots in the end.
So, Dan and the team had a lot of stuff they had to do with the fire. Like Varang, when she’s hosing the Maruis [homes built by the water-dwelling Metkayina clan of the Na’vi]. We did lots of reference, we got to get a flamethrower and go out to the dump. And we used a flamethrower and shot lots of reference of what flamethrowers do when you shoot them around. And they’re actually really hard to get to go where you want them to go…
And Dan can talk more about this, but you animate it and you tend to just do a straight line and go, okay, that’s where we want it to go. But when you actually shoot it, it’s like swinging a rope. Doesn’t do at all what you want it to do.
MH: That was, I just want to clarify– so the flamethrowers, that wasn’t the real flamethrower?
ES: We shot real flamethrower for reference, and match that with our CG. So all the flamethrowers, all the fires in the movie are all CG. There’s no real fires.
MH: I assumed it was just like with the water, that you [blend them together]. There was a scene, when he first shows her and she uses a flamethrower, I thought that was a real flamethrower, and that it had just been incorporated some with CG.
ES: Nope, that’s all, that’s all just CG. I mean, we had great references. But it’s all just CG. So yeah, it’s just one of those other elements that you have to really study to get right…
DB: For us, the flamethrower was a really good example, when we realized we couldn’t fire just a straight flame card, you know, emitting from it. We had to have a simulation ourselves within the scene.
But, it’s the same with things like the water. We work very closely with effects, the river rapids was a really fun sort of situation because we knew what we had to do.
You know, it wasn’t going to be that demanding of an animation job, when you look at it in relation to everything else that was going on, but we had to wait for the layout and models team to build a riverbed. They had to build a CG riverbed, the water race, and then the effects team had to pour a whole lot of water down it and simulate that flow, before we could even begin.
And so they were adjusting the riverbed so that the water kind of looked as close to Jim’s template as possible, and we were just waiting for that surface to come through, that volume of water to come through, so that we could begin our animation and put them in the flow of the water. And then once we were done, it went back to effects for them to simulate the effects of the characters being inside that body of water.
So yeah, both these films have been, for us – which has been really good – it’s been an occasion for us to work much more closely with the effects team.
And just on a personal note. I really like that. Because historically in this business, we in animation do our thing, and then we sort of kick it down the line, and effects at the end of the schedule are frantically trying to make something work with what we’ve done, you know. And so it’s really nice to be working with effects much earlier in the schedule, to plan our sort of our parallel workflow together.
ES: The boats are another good example for that, right? Like when you animate a boat in the water, if the boat’s too deep in the water or moving too fast or any of those things — because we’re doing everything realistic with proper physics and volume simulations and all those things — if the boat sits too low, the water ends up coming right up over the strafes and up into the boat. It doesn’t do the right thing. It doesn’t look like the boat’s moving through the water properly.
So everyone had to work a different way. Effects had to work a different way, animation had to work a different way. Even rendering those things. We had to look at how the water broke down as it went up the side of the boat into spray, and then mist, and then atomized, and then how to render it so you got that light through it. So it gave you the proper volumetrics and everything else.
When you start thinking about all the different levels of detail in all the different scenes, it becomes a little mind numbing, to be honest.
Thank you again to Wētā VFX Supervisor Eric Saindon and Animation Supervisor Daniel Barrett for speaking about their work on Avatar: Fire and Ash. Be sure to check back for more of our conversation this week.