Avatar: The Way of Water

Sarah Brown Columnist

Back in 2019, internationally acclaimed film director James Cameron delivered his first feature film in a decade – and what an achievement it turned out to be! Avatar was an overnight boxoffice sensation, becoming the world’s highestgrossing movie of all time, winning dozens of international awards (including three Academy Awards) and achieving worldwide acclaim for its production, cinematography and special effects.

Thirteen years later, in December 2022, Cameron and Avatar producer Jon Landau introduced the second in the Avatar series. Titled Avatar: The Way of Water, it was translated into 160 languages worldwide and once again smashed box-office records, becoming the highest-grossing film of both 2022 and the COVID-19 pandemic era. What’s more, the movie broke new ground in technological innovation, delivering an outstanding experience in cinematic realism and magic.

Mainly set in 2170 – 15 years after the events of the first film – Avatar: The Way of Water continues the story of Jake Sully (played once again by Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña). They live happily on Pandora, a water-filled, Earth-like habitable moon, and now have a family of five children – Neteyam, Lo’ak and Tuk, and adopted children Kiri and Spider.

Tragically though, circumstances force the family to flee to the oceanic Metkayina clan, who live among the distant atolls of Pandora and whose lifestyle matches the rhythms of the waters. There the family must adapt to ocean life to survive, and once again Jake and Neytiri must work with the army of the Na’vi race to protect their home.

Revolutionising movie technology

The movie’s success can be attributed in large part to its use of groundbreaking technology and astonishing visual effects, especially those that bring ‘the way of water’ to life. If you’ve seen the movie you’ll know that the characters spend a lot of its three-plus hours diving in and out of the ocean, communing and communicating far beneath its surface. It’s an amazing sight, thanks to years of work by the partnership of James Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment and New Zealand’s Wētā FX - an Oscar-winning visual effects powerhouse and a key player in the making of Avatar 1.

The making of the movie began in 2013, when Cameron gathered a team of writers to start planning the sequel to Avatar 1. Jon Landau, who’d produced all Cameron’s movies since Titanic in 1997, realised that the technological process that had been used to create the characters in Avatar 1 – called ‘performance capture’, in which actors’ body movements, voices and facial expressions are recorded then used to create their characters – wasn’t going to work under water. A new, and most importantly accurate and believable, solution was required.

Innovation and ingenuity

To ensure that the interactions between the characters and the water were as realistic as possible, a team of experts that included Wētā FX specialists was brought together to form the ‘Water Taskforce’. They in turn worked with New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research to design computergenerated water, taking into account its effects on tides, wind and the sea floor. The design was used in creating a 3,500,000-litre tank that could mimic the ocean’s kinetics and in which much of the performance-capture filming would take place.

It wasn’t going to be easy, as recording the underwater scenes presented major challenges for the actors and those in the crew responsible for filming and recording them. For example, the actors (who appear underwater for more than half of the movie) had to be able to stay underwater for as long as their performances required, and no-one could use scuba gear because the air bubbles would interfere with the special effects.

This left just one viable solution: everyone who would work in the tank had to learn how to hold their breath for extended periods of time. It took many months and the expertise of a professional free diver and coach, but the team eventually learned to be so comfortable in the water that they no longer thought they were diving. They were also taught to put on special wetsuits, turn on their own ‘facial capture’ camera rigs for each take (these would convert their face movements into a digital format), go through a safety countdown, and dive down and find their marks before performing their scenes.

The entire performance-capture shoot took about 18 months. In that time more than 250,000 free dives were made, and at its busiest the tank held 26 people underwater and holding their breaths. Then of course there were the grips (camera support equipment technicians) and lighting specialists, who were constantly submerging to tweak things on the set.

Among all this there were some true free-diving superstars. While most people could hold their breaths for up to four minutes, Kate Winslet, who plays the Na’vi character Ronal, reportedly held her breath for seven minutes and 15 seconds!

A triumph in Kiwi expertise

For the Wētā FX team, Avatar: The Way of Water was to be a project unlike any other, with challenges on a scale it had never experienced.

Given the challenge of blending underwater filming and performance capture, the team took a year and a half to develop a system that could record the movements of people and objects on land and under water. It was the start of what would be the company’s biggest-ever visual effects project, requiring a total of nearly 3.3 billion thread powers (a way of measuring computing power). To cope with this huge amount of data, Wētā FX had to outsource the services of a cloud storage company.

The filming for Avatar: The Way of Water began in New Zealand in September 2017 and ended in late September 2020. Much of the movie’s live action was shot in Wellington and Auckland, and more than 90 percent of the crew were Kiwis. Of those, 46 featured in the movie itself (including Cliff Curtis as Tonowari and Duane Evans Jr as Roxto) and more than 100 local stunt artists and almost 800 Kiwi extras were also involved. According to Wētā FX, 57 new species of sea creatures were created for the film, and of the 3,240 effects shoots, 2,225 involved water.

Avatar: The Way of Water’s world premiere was held on 6 December 2022 at London’s Odeon Luxe Leicester Square. The result of millions of dollars, hundreds of people’s dedication and an uncountable number of hours worked, it’s truly an international success story – a source of great pride for all the New Zealanders who helped to transform an idea into a dream come true.