Early peek at “avatar” production design

by David Cohen

James Cameron’s megabudget sci-fi spectacle Avatar is one of the most anticipated films of the year. The road to its upcoming December release has been filled with artistic, financial and creative obstacles. For production designer Rick Carter, the big challenge was getting inside Cameron’s head.

Working on Avatar, Carter had to envision the planet Pandora in detail.

“It was literally as if Jim had been to this place,” says Carter, a Hollywood Award honoree for production design. “He was coming back with fragments and glimpses he could express to us, but then we had to try to figure out how to make that come alive for him and something we felt an audience could relate to.”

Avatar tells the story of an extreme rehabilitation program: In an attempt to walk again, a paraplegic former Marine named Jake travels to the jungles of the extraterrestrial realm called Pandora, home of the Na’vi, a technologically primitive but physically superior race.

To picture Pandora, Carter created what he calls a “lush homegrown forest that’s way overscale for anything we’ve ever experienced, but also has enough alien qualities that you realize what you’re seeing is not just a few flowers poked into the midst of an otherwise normal environment. The essence of it is very different.”

At night, the forests of Pandora light up like a psychedelic black-light poster. Cameron’s inspiration for that, Carter believes, came from his deep-sea diving experiences.

“The whole idea of (that) bioluminescent world at night is something he’d actually witnessed when he was down at the bottom of the ocean during his Titanic time,” Carter says. “That bioluminescence is almost like a nervous system of the planet, and that’s what's at stake in the movie, as you start to get past the initial foray into the Na’vi culture and seeing the drama start to emerge between the military-industrial complex that wants to exploit the world.”

In order to breathe on Pandora, humans have created human-alien hybrids (the eponymous avatars), and it's through one of these creatures that Jake is able to walk again. But will he remain human or go native after he falls in love with one of the locals, a girl named Neytiri? Intergalactic peace depends on it.

What spells success for Avatar, however, is good old human identification. "The real challenge is whether you feel the emotion coming through from the characters, especially the Neytiri character and ultimately Jake’s avatar,” says Carter. “When you look into those eyes, do you feel the connection's real? And then, can you give yourself over to it and not look at it at arm’s distance and think,”'Yes, that’s wonderful technically, but I don’t really feel anything.”

For Carter, Avatar is a movie “where the form and the content come together. We can really relate to the digital imagery in a way that not only suspends our disbelief but invites us to be immersed in this new world.”

Definitely, “the medium has evolved,” says Carter, looking back at his first production-designer gig, on Hal Ashby’s Second Hand Hearts in 1981. “And with the introduction of all the digital imagery, there’s been a whole new ability to create worlds far beyond what it was when I started.”

Carter was also there on Back to the Future II & III, Jurassic Park and Forrest Gump, among others, and he’s moved into worlds where it's all digital and there’s motion capture, he says. Along the way, Carter has “found it very interesting to tap into some of the visual effects designers who are coming from the other side of the equation, the post-production, bringing them forward. The two of us collaborate from the beginning on the look of the movie, especially with things that have never been done before.”

Carter uses the words “us” and “we” a lot when he talks about his film work. On Polar Express, he brought on Doug Chang, a visual effects designer. On Avatar, which Carter calls “a hybrid movie comprisedof live action and motion capture”, he turned to Bob Stromberg.

“Bob had been instrumental in the design of much of the ecosystem of the planet Pandora. It just seemed natural to have him share credit. So it’s unusual,” Carter says of his penchant for collaboration, “but I see it as a way to move into these films. We used to joke we’re creating the airplane in flight, because we're actually making the movie but we don’t even know the road we’re on to create the movie until you do it.”

Recently, Cameron told his Avatar production designer, “I'm the one who could pose the question, but it took everybody to collaborate, to come together and find the answers.”

“He’d never said that before,” says Carter, “I just thought I’d leave you with that.”

Why is Computer Animation Important in the Film Industry?

The Digital Medium Has an Important Contribution to Cinema’s Artistic and Entertainment Values

For more than 100 years since its birth, the movie industry has evolved much as an art form and a creative industry. Since then, it has provided major contributions in the arts, culture, politics and technology. And whether it's in Hollywood, Bollywood or any other film industry center in the world, each one continues to develop better technologies to keep up with the rising demand for valuable and entertaining content. And this is where computer animation gets incorporated in the film’s special effects, which serves as a powerful tool to tell impressive stories in the film medium. Instead of the traditional way of drawing each movement frame by frame (24 hand-drawn frames with incremental changes in each drawing's movement for a one second motion), the digital process allows for less drawings and utilizing computer software to enhance each image of the moving picture.

A Brief History of Computer Animation Computer animation started way back in the 80’s with Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan using computer techniques to generate the Genesis Effect scene. Jurassic Park also used computer-generated images for realistic living creatures in the film. The 90s saw the significant impact of computer animation with Toy Story, the first full digital animated feature that became a box office success and garnered many technical awards in top award-giving bodies such as The Academy Awards. Babe, a combination of live and computer animated effects, became a huge hit as well. This animation timeline continues in the new millennium with Shrek, The Lord of the Rings and many more.

Animation and Special Effects Going beyond the realistic world allows the viewers to escape from their own lives towards an out-of-this-world and hyper-realistic experience in audio-visual form. There are even some cinematic works mainly relying on computer artists’ digital animation and special effects skills to make the film bankable with such visual flair and “wow factor”.

There are many aspects involved in the job which includes character design, digital painting (traditional painting techniques such as watercolor and oils are applied using digital tools through computer software), texture mapping (a method of adding detail and surface texture, a bitmap or raster image, or color to a computer-generated graphic or 3D model), in betweening (a process of generating intermediate frames between two images to give the appearance that the first image moves smoothly towards the second image where key frames help create the illusion of motion), lighting effects, camera movements and other special effects and animation methods.

The full spectrum of animation in filmmaking is quite large. Animation jobs may include works for an opening/closing billboard or credits (making the opening credits of Spiderman or the closing credits of Alice in Wonderland), a production outfit’s logo (making the Warner Bros. logo fit the mood and look specific to a film like in 300), special effects on scenes (like in Harry Potter movies) and more. There are films requiring photorealistic and seamless 3D rendering and animation (like in Avatar). There are those requiring the use of motion capture technology where a real actor’s movements are captured into the computer through attached points on the actor’s body in order to recreate an entirely new character (the historical use of motion capture is best utilized in the character Gollum of The Lord of the Rings).

Fantasy, Epic and Adventure Movies Fantasy and adventure movies like The Chronicles of Narnia, King Kong, How to Train Your Dragon and 2012offer the spectators the chance to explore a world beyond imagination. And filming such thrilling creations of the mind require much resources. And to a certain point, it is impossible to shoot all the required elements live. And this is when animation, digital art and graphics become parts of the overall special effects process of creating a spectacular fantasy world for viewers to enjoy. From the digital backgrounds to the magical creatures, animators and special effects artists work hand-in-hand to realize the filmmakers’ vision for the film.

Action and Superhero Movies For all those engaging stunts and chasing scenes for films like Wanted, Transformers, Iron Man and Sin City, the magic of recreating or enhancing the live action shots become the source of adrenaline for those action movie fans. Animation and special effects can make a huge blast without the risk of getting people hurt if something would instead be literally blown out during the shoot. Martial arts and fight scenes are also enhanced to make them look more suspense-filled. The way blood is shown during fights can be realistic or anything beyond real-according to the director’s more detailed instructions.

Horror and Suspense Movies Using digital magic through the concept of animation and computer graphics are very important in horror moviesrequiring gore and goosebump-inducing sights of spirits(The Ring), monsters (28 Weeks Later) and possessed beings (The Exorcism of Emily Rose). With animation, special effects, sound effects and music, a horror film becomes such a hit. Otherwise, if the audience doesn’t get to accept the movie’s make-believe offer, the motion picture loses the chance to tell a good story. And it fails to impress the viewers from getting those horrific chills.

Romance, Musical, Comedy and Drama Movies Even romance, musical, comedy and dramas movies can utilize computer animation to make the storytelling more technically polished. It doesn’t always have to be a magical scene or a huge explosion. It can be a simple background change or a significant computer-generated image to enhance specific scenes. And these are usually utilized to make them look as if they are part of any regular scene. Such effects are available in movies like Australia, Mamma Mia, Shallow Hal and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

The Success of Walt Disney Since Walt Disney’s release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, animated films aimed at family audiences have become the company's niche. For decades, Disney has produced films using traditional animation, until computer graphics came in during the 90’s. The animation medium extends into the many formats becoming more available to filmmakers. And Disney continues to explore the ever-changing playing field of cinema by also producing live action films within the same target market. Recently, showing 3D movies is fast becoming a trend. And the company keeps up with this demand as well.

The Impressive Track Record of Pixar Animation Studios Pixar Animation Studios has a consistently impressive track record for quality feature and short films (their trademark is having a short film before the main feature like in Academy Award-winning films as Finding Nemo, Wall-E and Up).

After a few films mainly pioneering in computer animation, Pixar films readily rose up the ladder during the 90’s to become readily in par with the works of top animation companies in Hollywood. And its box office successes back up the studios’ countless awards for both the technical and thematic brilliance of their films including other major award-giving bodies as the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films for The Incredibles, BAFTA Awards for Monsters, Inc., and Golden Globes for Ratatouille. The company proves that the right combination of proprietary technology and world-class creative talent is the key to the animation film industry’s success. And with such memorable characters and heartwarming stories appealing to audiences of all ages, it is no surprise that Pixar teams up with the veteran Disney in creating many great films that are now mostly classics in world cinema history.

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