The Images, Colors, and Mind-Boggling Technology of Avatar: The Way of Water

“Russ and I have worked together so much, we’re kind of like an old married couple,” says James Cameron. He’s talking about— and is on this Zoom call with— the cinematographer Russell Carpenter, who like Cameron won an Oscar for his work on Titanic and reunited with the director for Avatar: The Way of Water. To Cameron, who spent years developing new technology before he even started principal photography on the film, Carpenter is a vital grounding force. “Russ's greatest gift as a cinematographer is that it's an aesthetic feeling that he brings to it,” Cameron says. “I get up in my head technically, and he kind of always grounds me with, ‘What are we trying to say here? What's our mood?’”

Having not worked on the first Avatar, it was Carpenter’s first time lighting virtual environments— “but after a couple days,” he says, “I felt like I could ride the bike.” Cinematography on an Avatar movie happens in many stages, from lighting on live-action actors like Jack Champion, who played Spider, to adjustments after the Weta visual effects team has done their work. Thanks to a suite of tools called Gazebo, Cameron and Carpenter could view a sort of rough cut of the live-action filming merged with motion capture work they’d already done, meshing the two technological worlds during filming and allowing them to see their characters interacting in front of them. It took “a lot of voodoo” to get it there, as Cameron puts it. ”However, once that fusion has been made, there's a lot of freedom,” Carpenter adds. “There’s a lot of room for making a change.”

Below, Carpenter and Cameron break down the creation of some of the film’s signature scenes, from underwater adventures to the intense third-act showdown between the Na’vi and ther human attackers. Some of the process is complex—virtual lighting grids, giant lights standing in for the sun, actors filming their performances twice—and some involves techniques as old as cinema itself. 

The early scenes of The Way of Water return to the jungles and mountains of Pandora where the first film took place, though some locations—like this campsite hosting both Na’vi and human rebels—were new. For Carpenter, who didn’t work on Avatar, it was a different kind of learning curve to adjust to. 

James Cameron: Russ and I have a shorthand from... It goes back to True Lies, but Titanic. And we're going after an aesthetic. What's our color palette? What are we trying to say to the audience subliminally? Is it bright? Is it cool? Is it dark? Is it moody? Is it glorious? Is it luminous? And there was some color palette stuff that was worked out on the first movie, which Russ didn't work on. So part of it, I think, Russ, for you, part of it was just a learning curve of seeing what had worked the first time and then where to take it and move forward from there.

Russell Carpenter: Every place had a color scheme. I lit the high camp scene where the Na’vi return after a raid. We talked about where the light was coming from, what the fires would look like inside the tent. but also because this is an environment that is part Na’vi but is also somewhat influenced by the technology of, what was it, the Biolabs—

Cameron: Yeah, Biolab, the human guys, the Project Avatar people that were there. So you created a mix of light. You had a lot of blue edge light as I recall. 

Carpenter: Yeah, it was lovely because there's this beautiful conversation between Neytiri and Sully, and they're just outside the tents. So you've got this beautiful blue light that's influenced by some of the lights that our, let's say, our good humans brought to that area. But then also, that plays off the warmth of the fire. So, Jim's always working that way to get a lot of color spectrum into his scenes.

The sun is a major element in both the visuals and story of The Way of Water, particularly when the daily eclipse creates a dramatic nighttime showdown in the third act. Here, it’s a gentle backdrop for the Sully family as they fly to find a new home—but as with everything in an Avatar movie, it’s far more complex than it looks. 

Cameron: What did you use for your main sun elements, Russ? I can't remember.

Carpenter: Well, it really depended. We ran out of space on that huge set where the Sea Dragon [the large ship at the center of the final action sequence] was. So we worked with one very strong element, it's called an ARRI Max. You have to make it all look like one sun, but then we had other lights clustered around that and they would make strategic strikes. It was just part of the logistics. We're just finding the space to get your light back far enough to make a very convincing sun.

Cameron: The sun was important because there are many flavors of sun. And Russ and I had big discussions about, "How late in the day are we? What's our key fill ratio and what's our color dynamic from the key side to the fill side?" So if you're midday, there's not much of a color dynamic, you get a little bit of blue in the sky, but if you're late day, it really pulls apart by thousands of degrees Kelvin. And so we'd have long discussions about that and we could actually preview it in Gazebo. Because we used simul cam for just about everything, because we wanted to compose to what the final shot would look like.

Comments are closed.