On The Infinite Innovations Deborah L. Scott Created For ‘Avatar’

There are many reasons a person would be impressed by James Cameron’s Avatar films, but the costumes designed by Deborah L. Scott deserve special attention; they are bespoke pieces as magnificent as they are technologically groundbreaking.

Scott’s work has been lauded with an Oscar, a BAFTA, a bevy of Costume Designer’s Guild Awards, and many, many other coveted honors, so having the opportunity to talk to her about costume design was a very real privilege. Especially since we met to chat about what makes these films, Avatar: Fire and Ash most recently, different than the costumes designed for literally any other production.

My lovely readers might remember that one of this writer’s favorite things about costume design is that it proves how infinite solutions are, that there are as many ways to successfully costume a production as there are designers who do that work. Process is something which fascinates me, and I asked Scott about hers.

“It’s actually kind of formulaic,” she said with a gentle laugh. “I think what makes it easiest is that there’s a kind of a formula. Because you read the script and then you sort of just slowly break it down, right? The first thing is, you have to figure out the characters. How many, what kind, what their age, and it really helps to know if you can know what the casting is. So you have a visual in your mind, but then it’s like the formula is over how many days does it take place? Where is it? Where are we in time and space and place so that you know where you’re setting this person. and then reading the script, involving yourself in the narrative of what’s going on. That part’s kind of pretty easy. You break it all down. I think most of us have ideas while we’re doing that. You start to sort of formulate whatever the visual might be in your mind. And of course, you talk to the director and see what their vision is, and the other department heads. Then you kind of go to practical issues.”

Making Military Uniforms En Masse

A lot of the writing about the Avatar films focuses on the exceptional work created with brand new technology, and very justly so. But, as someone more than a little obsessed with WWII, this writer cannot help but be elated to see how much time and effort was dedicated to the production of military uniforms in Avatar: Fire and Ash. Especially since a film like this one involves so much physicality and so many battles.

When a designer is costuming a film, it is never a question of simply making or sourcing a single costume for each performer. In addition to principals there are secondary characters, stunt people, stand-ins, and extras to be dressed, not to mention the endless continuity concerns which must be remembered. If someone is splattered with gore, if an officer’s uniform gets torn in one scene, any such changes to wardrobe must remain, at least until the character changes what they are wearing. This is not a small thing, it is imperative, and this is one of the many ways that costume design supports suspension of disbelief and allows it to continue throughout a film.

By its very nature, telling stories on film is collaborative work and no single department works in a vacuum. All things serve the script and its interpretation, what we might think of as a movie’s aesthetic, is always the vision of the story seen through the eye of the director. I told the award-winning designer that I very much wanted to know how she executed James Cameron’s idea of futuristic military uniforms, and how she diffused the myriad logistical and continuity issues which were required of the hundreds of uniforms she created.

“There are a tremendous amount of uniforms in the movie,” Scott told me. “There’s the airfield, there’s the boat deck, those crab suits, there’s the medical unit, which wasn’t in film one, we’ve been developing all of this over time. I think the narrative really relates to us, as humans watching this story, because the humans have to identify with the humans to understand the conflict. If someone’s dressed evil, if there’s some ‘evil’ uniform, you think, okay, well, I’m not them. That’s not us. The relatability is really important to making us feel part of the story and also part of the conflict.”

During our conversation, I learned that when the first Avatar film came out in 2009, the use of digital camo was very popular.

“Everyone was using it,” Scott explained, “I used it myself in a Transformer film. It was exciting, a cool new idea. But then, it really fell out of practice because it did not work.”

So, the designer made the decision, on top of her hundreds (thousands?) of responsibilities, to redesign the camouflage to be used in the Avatar universe.

“The basic uniform for the Recombinants and the Resources Development Administration,” Scott said, “they were established in film one and I came in the middle of film one, I didn’t design the uniforms. And the fact is, there’s time passing, so later I altered the uniform a little bit, I went back to basics in terms of construction. But I was really thinking about what camouflage was and I decided I was going to redo the camo.”

I asked about the thought process behind this, how she settled on the textile design which made it into the second and third films, both of which she designed.

“If you were flying around Pandora and you looked down, what would you see?” Scott asked me. “What element are you using to camouflage? It’s heavy foliage, right? There’s a lot of trees and a lot of green, and that’s the idea I went with. I threw it out to some of my illustrators and designers and said, let’s work on a pattern. And I wanted it to be fluid, not blocky. We went in with the colors and on our first pass, Jim and I thought, well, maybe we should use the same pattern, but with different colors for different units. We did a lot of trial and error around that. And Edie Falco was a major focus.”

For anyone uninitiated, Falco is the actress who portrays General Frances Ardmore, the Expeditionary Force Commander for the RDA in Avatar: The Way of Water and Avatar: Fire and Ash, and she is very much an antagonist.

“Edie was the focus of that military look,” Scott continued. “We did a lot of experimenting with her in different kinds of lighting. We did a gray version, a green version, and we knew the green version was going to be constant. We did a blue version for the Marines.”

Then, Cameron and Scott decided that perhaps all of this work, no matter how good it was, might start to confuse the viewer.

“We both decided that it was over complicated,” the Oscar winning designer said. “So we stuck with the green and I think, ultimately, it was a really good call. So we stuck with that. We had a lot of different kinds of units and Ben Procter, our production designer, had been working on the environments, the hardscapes and the human element of the movie. And he had done some initial, very basic placement of figures in his drawings that were very, very realistic. It’s interesting because mostly that has to do with the live action portion,” Scott explained. “And in these films, people are so interested in the Na’vi, in the Pandoran world that gets kind of overlooked until you get into all the battles, the ships and all the gear that everyone loves. Jim is a lot like me in terms of that sci-fi scope. He doesn’t want it to look like Star Trek. He doesn’t want it to look like Star Wars. He doesn’t want it to look like a fake uniform, he wants the real stuff.”

Creating Costumes Just for VFX

The Avatar films are a blend of live action and animation, but regardless of medium, someone still designs what the characters are wearing. I believe that character design involves designing costumes, but with an expert in front of me, I made sure to ask her opinion.

“It’s absolutely costume,” Scott told me. “Anytime you have a body of any sort, whether it’s a nine foot tall blue person or tiny little purple person, it doesn’t matter. If you’re clothing them, what they are wearing is part of their identity. So, having a costume designer is really important. And for these movies in particular, Jim and our late producer, Jon Landau, were very insistent on not only having a costume designer there from the beginning, but all the way through post. There are probably animations where you can turn over a, and I know people do it, turn over a 2D design on paper, and then they take it from there, and they figure out how it works on a body. But I think the complexity of the costumes, it’s really beyond animation. We don’t even really call it that.”

I had to know exactly what she meant, as I feel certain my lovely readers will understand completely.

“I supervised the VFX artists,” Scott explained. “We made all the costumes in real life because of the complexity of the garments, if you don’t have it in real life, you just don’t have it. Making them gives a perfect template to turn over to the VFX artists. It’s like, we give them the real thing, then they do their thing. And I supervised them doing their thing.”

Here’s how that worked. After Scott and her team produced a costume, each one was scanned. Then the VFX artists would draw them onto the digital bodies.

“They get the actual garment, or piece of jewelry,” she told me, “and a ton of research that goes along with it, including photographs, which probably aren’t as helpful as having the actual real thing in their hands. But we do a lot of testing, with water or wind or whatever the situation might need. And they get all that footage, which helps them with their simulation. If we were just doing something like blue jeans, well, people would get that, almost everybody wears them. But if I’m handing them a piece of molded leather, or a cape with a bunch of stuff on it, the artists have no reference point for that, the weight or the materiality. It’s something that’s never been done before. Our pieces are all one of a kind, they’re bespoke. So no one’s ever seen them or put their hands on them till we’ve made them. The understanding and the computer language, they have to develop it.”

I asked the designer if she could give me a specific example.

“There’s a lot of abalone shell used in the Na’vi clans,” she said,”it’s all over the place. And if you look at a shell like that, polished or not polished, the amount of colors vary from shell to shell. And I would just load them up. And at first they were like,’ oh God, how are we going to get that?’ So they worked really hard at understanding the language of that visual. And, sometimes it might be a little too shiny, or there wasn’t enough purple or whatever, the guidance that I could give them, because I know the pieces, was really important.”

I very much hope that there will be an exhibition of these costumes at some point, the work is exquisite, and seeing it, the massive number of pieces made, the thousands of hours that went into perfecting every detail, seeing the garments really drives home the magnitude of what Scott and her team created.

With a better idea of how much work the costume department had done, how many pieces never worn but made for the computer generated art, and with the caveat that I understood that this part might not technically count as costume, I asked about the mech suits, the SMP-2 Crab Suits, to use Avatar-specific terminology.

“Those were definitely a collaboration,” she explained. “Design wise, that’s mostly left to the art department,, but there’s a lot of collaboration. You start talking about how the person got in there? How much of the body do you see? How do they stay inside?We’re always working together. And in those instances, there are a sort of ‘real’ version, actual things that you can put a person in. A lot of them are visual effects, to get the kind of movement, but Jim and the team worked for a really long time, especially with Edie, that unit as a part of the acting. It was a great collaboration, and the easiest part for me, because I just had to figure out how to get the person in there and help with things they might not understand like what you actually need to hold a body, the logistics of it. It has to be possible.”

“Jim Cameron doesn’t do anything that you can’t actually do in real life,” Scott told me with a smile. “You might forget when you’re working with them, the depth of his experience, but it becomes very evident in his work. And when you’re working with him, you know, like Simon Franklin, the music composer always says, ‘we don’t make stuff up.’ And he’s right, you really can’t, you have to prove concept in every way.”

A Hollywood Reunion

In Avatar: Fire and Ash, one of the new characters is played by the objectively perfect Kate Winslet. When this writer was in the seventh grade, Titanic, the film Scott won an Academy Award for, also by James Cameron, opened in theaters. For my little clique, this was a very big deal, and I will not embarrass us by saying exactly how many times we saw it projected onto the big screen. But, before our conversation ended, I had to ask the costume designer about working with Winslet again. It felt like one of those full-circle moments which are usually only found in Hollywood blockbusters and I was very happy to know they can happen in the real world too.

“She was wonderful,” Scott said with a giant smile and a gentle laugh. “I hadn’t seen her in 20 years, it’s hard sometimes, especially if you live in different countries, or you’re not on the same movie. And Titanic was such a beginning, in a weird way, for both of us, and she’s so lovely. And it’s been 20 years, I’ve changed, she’s changed. The second we saw each other, it was just like, Oh, my gosh, how did this happen? And then helping her develop her character in that same way.”

When Winslet came on Scott was still at the start, these movies take years to make. So when they and the director met, they were working from illustrations, or with small pieces, like jewelry which had already been made.

“We had been conceiving of this character,” Scott told me, “so we were bringing what we had down and showing it to her. It was really, really fun. And the kind of gravitas that her performance gives the movie, it’s pretty wonderful. She’s like a queen. Every time I see her, she could be playing like a maid, it doesn’t matter. She’s amazing, such a good actress. Her character, Ronal, really suits her, I think.”

I asked the designer if there was anything she really wanted audiences to know about her work on these films. What about this on-going Avatar project was most important to her personally.

“The world building that we do within our department is so important,” Deborah L. Scott said. “I’m the head of the department, so my name gets to go on the movie, and I orchestrate a lot of people. But all of them have incredible, amazing talents that they bring to this project, to any project. You simply cannot do this work alone, and if you tried to, you’d never make it. Really, I stand on the shoulders of a great many talented people. That’s really important to me, to acknowledge them, and to be grateful.”

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