Inside Avatar: The Way of Water’s incredible process for matching Spider to the Na’vi

To nan astonishment of nary one: Avatar: The Way of Water, James Cameron’s original 2009 film, picked up nan 2023 Oscar for ocular effects. That’s because nan VFX department’s activity touched connected each facet of nan movie — moreover nan quality performances. In nan lead up to nan movie’s upcoming integer location release, 20th Century Studios has shared an exclusive clip pinch Polygon from a behind-the-scenes featurette dedicated to nan characteristic of Spider and nan motion-capture exertion utilized to bring him into nan action.

Spider, a caller characteristic introduced successful Avatar: The Way of Water played by Jack Champion (Scream VI), is nan adopted quality boy of series’ protagonists Jake Sully and Neytiri. Naturally, nan process of filming human-scale characters other of nan film’s comparatively elephantine Na’vi characters presented important imaginative and method challenges for Cameron and his team.

While Champion had to replicate his full capacity for Avatar: The Way of Water doubly during nan film’s production, this caller clip reveals that definite scenes required nan unit to movie scenes not only twice, but besides astatine different scales at nan aforesaid time.

“When we did seizure connected nan first movie, we were capturing everybody astatine nan aforesaid scale; It was one-to-one,” Jon Landau, a long-time collaborator of James Cameron’s and nan shaper for Avatar: The Way of Water, says during nan clip. “Here, we had truthful galore scenes pinch humans and Na’vi characters, that we [needed] aggregate scales to seizure a scene.”

Landau elaborates by explaining that, successful bid to movie scenes wherever aggregate Na’vi and quality characters are on-screen simultaneously, they would person to build 2 abstracted mobility seizure sets and movie mocap doubles other of 1 different earlier converting that live-action footage into nan film’s last integer result. The behind-the-scenes footage itself is arsenic hilarious arsenic it is impressive, pinch actors successful achromatic motion-capture suits moving successful tandem down ramps alongside mocap actors hoisting ample bluish mannequin stand-ins for nan Na’vi for illustration immoderate bizarre obstacle people from Nickelodeon’s Legends of nan Hidden Temple.

To correspond nan tallness quality betwixt Spider compared to that of nan Na’vi, who guidelines respective feet taller than that of an mean human, fto unsocial a quality child, nan squad worked pinch smaller body-double actors who performed other nan film’s lead actors for illustration Sam Worthington and Stephen Lang. “I double for Spider because I’m nan quality offset to a Na’vi,” Kacie Borrowman, nan mobility seizure character for Champion, says successful nan clip. “Na’vis are nine-feet-tall; your mean quality is astir six-feet-tall. But we person average-height humans playing our Na’vi, truthful we request personification who’s smaller than an mean quality to play a quality truthful nan eyelines will beryllium correct.”

An exhausting and time-consuming process? Undoubtedly, but you can’t reason pinch nan on-screen results of nan film’s method advancement compared to nan original film.

Avatar: The Way of Water will beryllium available to exclusively acquisition connected digital starting connected March 28.