In addition to their merits as excellent movies, James Cameron’s Avatar films are unprecedented technical achievements. The 2009 original blew audiences away with its groundbreaking use of motion capture and 3D to transport audiences to the world of Pandora. The sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, literally invented underwater motion capture. Combined with shooting at a high frame rate, the aquatic sequences of the sequel are astounding, emotional, and unlike anything else that we’ve ever seen in a movie. That sounds like an overstatement, but if you’ve seen The Way of Water in Dolby Cinema or IMAX in 3D at High Frame Rate, you know it’s not an overstatement at all.
When you’re watching a movie, you’re invested in the experience of enjoying the moment. You’re probably not thinking, “how the heck did they make this?” Especially for a movie like Avatar, which combines naturalistic settings with cutting-edge technology to the point where you don’t know what’s real and what’s CGI (beyond the catch-all, “probably everything”). You just submit to “movie magic” and let the whole thing wash over you. But if you’re the kind of cinephile who loves to see ‘behind-the-scenes’ and learn how these things are made, one might imagine there’s more than enough innovation in these films to warrant a feature-length documentary about the making of the Avatar movies.
I’m not the only one who thinks so: Zoe Saldaña, one of the film’s main stars, agrees. In an interview with Beyond Noise, she hinted that James Cameron is potentially working on a documentary about the making of the Avatar films. She goes on to say that “performance capture is the most empowering form of acting,” referring to the process of shooting, not on a traditional set, but on a motion capture set with 3D camera placement done after the fact, but with the actor’s performance completely intact and transposed onto the computer-generated character bearing their likeness… Their ‘avatar,’ if you will.
The legend goes that Kate Winslet set a record for holding her breath underwater during a scene for Avatar: The Way of Water, beating Tom Cruise’s record from Missing Impossible: Rogue Nation. I’m sure footage of this exists and would absolutely be a highlight of the film. Heck, I’d pay good money to see any of the underwater motion capture stuff. The underwater sequences in The Way of Water are downright transcendent in my opinion, and I want to see how they did it! I’d also love to see Sigourney Weaver acting alongside her costars, since she plays a teenage Navi despite being a senior citizen when she shot her part. There are so many CGI effects across the films; some are obvious, some are invisible, but all of them add up to even more than the sum of their parts.
Avatar: Fire and Ash hits theaters on December 19.
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