“Our crew has been working on Avatar: The Way Of Water for 5 years and some members of my team have been working on this project for 10 years. We’ve all been working on this since Avatar came out in 2009. It’s not always the case that VFX artists working on a film are thrilled and excited to watch it, or 100 percent with what they produced. But it happened here.”
Pavani detailed the Herculean task of creating Avatar 2 and shared some notable stats. She said: “The film contains about 3200 CGI shots, 2200 of which are water. If you tell this to a VFX artist 5 years before the film comes out, they’ll probably swoon. This is because the process is very difficult. We have already made water films. Along with our Senior VFX Supervisor Joe Letteri we worked on James Cameron’s Alita: Battle Angel in 2017 where this project became a testing ground for figuring out what it takes to create the underwater footage for a film. This film only had 10 shots where the main character puts on a suit and goes underwater, and yet it took us a year to get those shots right. Imagine how long it took Avatar to take 2200 shots.”
Pavani didn’t shy away from calling Avatar 2 a mammoth production: “Avatar: The Way Of Water is the biggest visual effects film Weta FX has made to date. And Weta has been around forever, so I think that’s a pretty big deal.”
On the other hand, there were also reports that Avatar 2 showings around the world and in India were also suffering from some technical issues. There were news reports mentioning that several theaters in Japan showing Avatar 2 crashed in the middle of the show. While hundreds of viewers in India have also noticed technical glitches and flaws in some Avatar screenings. While that’s not a direct explanation for the hiccups, Avatar 2’s variable frame rate has brought the added element of challenge to its showings.
Discussing the need to have different frame rates for the avatar shots, Pavani explained, “The entire film was shot at 48 frames per second, but there are some shots that were shot at 24 frames per second. Some viewers could tell the difference between the variable frame rates. Rendering 48 FPS for the entire movie is quite an achievement as there are twice as many frames to process. The data storage for Avatar in 2009, six months before release, reached the 1 petabyte mark and everyone on the Weta FX team received a reward for the milestone. We used to think it was a big deal that we hit 1 petabyte. But with Avatar 2, we hit 19 petabytes. That’s because rendering 48 FPS means doing everything twice. Twice as many images, you have to save everything, typesetters have to check and save more data. So Jim decided to take a call to shoot at 48fps. Those were scenes where at 24fps you would end up noticing strobing or motion blur.”
Since Avatar 2 features a lot of underwater scenes, the 48 frames were the most important. Pavani explained, “We always knew the underwater footage would be 48 FPS because they needed it. Sometimes we used 48 FPS in shots with a fast-moving camera or in shots of Jake Sully dodging very close to the screen. The dialogue-based scenes or just one person speaking were limited to 24 frames.”
