Avatar: The Way of Water

Design | VFX

Building off of our experience working on James Cameron’s 2009 blockbuster Avatar, Cantina continued the collaboration on Avatar: The Way of Water with production designer Ben Procter to conceptualize detailed graphics and stereoscopic holograms to populate the world of Pandora and the RDA.

 We were brought on early in the process to help lay out the sets and block the action so that the human and CG characters could properly interact with the graphics and the holograms. This was particularly important for the enormous HoloFloor which James Cameron conceived for the RDA’s new Ops Center. Having the designs in place, at a high level of design fidelity, enabled Cameron to better understand how the various elements were going to be used compositionally to best communicate the story.

One distinctive aspect of this project was that Cantina had a team embedded within the Lightstorm art department to help ensure direct and efficient communication with the production designer, concept artists and virtual production teams. This also enabled us to explore the ideal stereoscopic representation of our graphics throughout the film, using unique tools and screening rooms found at Lightstorm. During live action photography in New Zealand, the production’s SimulCam technology allowed our graphics to be live comped into the camera monitors, informing actor interactions and on-set lighting.

 Another unique challenge was that the scope of our work included not just Avatar: The Way of Water but also the following sequel film. This was necessitated by the concurrent performance capture and live action photography of the second and third Avatar films, and added significantly to our design footprint and opportunity.