Here's How The Avatar Movies Are Actually Made, According To The Filmmakers

There's a reason why the phrase "movie magic" has stuck around for so long. To the average audience member, movies are a kind of magic. After all, when motion pictures began life they were generally treated as attractions before they were regarded as a new art form all their own, and that element of showmanship and illusion has continued via the art of special and visual effects. During the 1970s and '80s, visual effects were still by and large a discipline based in tangibility. That all changed with the advent of CGI, for while the principles of making a physical object in reality and something resembling such in computer graphics aren't all that different, the workflow and procedure is not something most people understood right away.

Some 30-odd years after CGI entered mainstream filmmaking in a big way, most everyone in the world has a basic understanding of how computers work, and many even have skills they take for granted which were cutting edge once upon a time (Photoshop, for instance, was co-created by ILM VFX supervisor John Knoll). Yet as consumer-grade tech has advanced, so has the technology used to create entire worlds on the silver screen. Most people have a general concept of how performance capture works when it comes to something like the "Avatar" movies, but the truth is these films have been pushing the envelope in VFX so much that they're not just winning Academy Awards for being pretty. I recently had the opportunity to speak with a couple key crew members who worked on all the "Avatar" films to date, and they provided a very concise (or as much as possible) explanation of what taking the actors' performance on stage all the way to a final shot looks like.

In general, most movies that make use of motion capture or performance capture technology (in which an actor is outfitted with a way for tracking software to record their motions and expressions during a scene) are doing so as a way of inserting a CG animated version of a character into an otherwise live-action shot. The big game-changing aspect of the original "Avatar" back in 2009 was that not only would there be multiple sci-fi characters in any given scene, but that the environments they were in would largely be animated and generated in CG, too. Thus, director James Cameron and his compatriots at Weta Digital devised a bifurcated shooting structure: a shoot on a performance capture stage, and then a shoot on a live-action stage. As Cameron, editorial, and the VFX team began the process of collecting footage, it became apparent that a new method of shot identification and development needed to be created.

The typical method of shot identification is one most audiences are familiar with. It's the scene and take numbers that are typically written on a production's clapper board, something shown at the beginning and ending of every shot so as to demarcate the scene and take number in order to help edit and sync sound with the film later on. Part of Cameron's innovation in shooting "Avatar" and its sequels involves a third phase of shot creation in between performance capture and a live-action shoot, which is a setup of the virtual camera. Because of this, it became necessary to help identify which take of which angle of which scene was which. Fortunately, a method was devised, even if it wouldn't be pretty or brief.

During a demonstration at Lightstorm Entertainment earlier this week celebrating the Digital release of "Avatar: Fire and Ash," Academy Award-winning VFX supervisor Richard Baneham went into detail regarding the nomenclature used by everyone on the "Avatar" crew. For reference, he used a particular shot which happened to be on the monitor at the time. The number looked unwieldy: "3149_Z0Ba006c_0J01e...." Yet despite its rough appearance, Baneham explained how it helped the "Avatar" workflow:

"In 2005, we had to sit down and come up with a nomenclature that allowed us to communicate all the way through, not just here on stage, the lab upstairs, the post effects vendor in New Zealand. How do you tell the story of what happened with the file? So you'll see [...] there's Z, X and Y. Y would be as ordered by editorial, so we understood it's in its original ordered state. X would be if it changed on stage, Z was if it changed in the lab. So we're able to track the changes, instantly go, 'Okay, we know there's a difference in what was ordered and what we're shooting against.' [...] You'll get Z0B6 is the actual B6 performance. The J1 is the camera [...] and then you'll see the little A, B and C is if we move a character in the background in time. So it's a really simple way. Well, it was very complex, but it took us a long time to really get that nomenclature that looks like take and scene, but it communicates all the way through the pipe. Everybody can look at the nomenclature, go like, 'Oh, I know what happened and when it changed and who did it and why.' Just a simple series of letters and numbers."

Once the system was up and running, it took what could've been a massive miscommunication headache and made it a finely tuned production. That's what executive producer Rae Sanchini told me when I spoke with her following Richard Baneham's demonstration. According to Sanchini, the nomenclature is nothing less than the spine of the entire movie:

"Through our entire pipeline, just managing the material and where it is in the process is a huge part of the challenge on these films, so it's really, really been perfected. The pipeline works very well now, and big shout out to editorial for keeping all of this straight. This is probably the only film where editorial starts on the first day of performance capture and works all the way through to final delivery."

"Avatar: Fire and Ash" had no less than six editors: David Brenner, Nicolas De Toth, Jason Gaudio, John Refoua, Stephen E. Rivkin, and James Cameron himself. Given that plus all the aforementioned variations of shots, one could easily understand how having a useful communication system would be essential to even finishing a movie like "Avatar," let alone making it good. Obviously, there are a lot more moving parts when it comes to every contribution to the final film, but knowing this helps us understand how a movie like "Fire and Ash" is constructed rather than just chalking it up to "movie magic." If you're anything like me, this knowledge doesn't diminish one's wonder at the images the filmmakers create; it only enhances it.

"Avatar: Fire and Ash" is available on Digital now, and on 4K UHD, Blu-Ray, and DVD on May 19.