{"id":281281,"date":"2026-02-12T23:57:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T23:57:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/281281\/"},"modified":"2026-02-12T23:57:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T23:57:09","slug":"why-avatars-fire-effects-were-tougher-than-water-scenes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/281281\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Avatar\u2019s Fire Effects Were Tougher Than Water Scenes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe Avatar saga\u2019s effects team has been wowing audiences for 17 years, so it\u2019s perhaps easy to take for granted that James Cameron<\/a>\u2018s latest blockbuster is arguably the greatest special effects spectacle theater audiences have ever seen. With Avatar: Fire and Ash<\/a>, the Oscar-winning VFX team once again raised the bar for transporting a cast into the world of Pandora and delivered a film where every shot has at least some kind of CG element. But what were the toughest visual aspects in Fire and Ash to pull off? What shots did Cameron personally obsess over? And can the Academy really compare costumes worn by actors in traditional films to those rendered digitally? To find out, we spoke to a trio of leads on the project: executive producer, VFX supervisor and second unit director Richard Baneham; Weta FX senior visual effects supervisor Eric Saindon; and Weta FX senior animation supervisor Daniel Barrett.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat was the hardest effect in Fire and Ash to do?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tERIC SAINDON People are going to expect it\u2019s the big explosions and the water, but the subtle shots are the hardest for us. It\u2019s all the shots of Jake [Sam Worthington] being real subtle \u2014 he\u2019s not an over-actor by any means.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tDANIEL BARRETT It\u2019s true. When [franchise newcomer Oona Chaplin] began as Varang, Sam\u2019s advice to her was [to perform as if] \u201cevery shot is a close-up because you don\u2019t ultimately know where the camera is going to be.\u201d Those are the tricky ones because the whole performance is in the subtleties.<\/p>\n

\n\tRICHARD BANEHAM Your perception of an actor\u2019s eye direction is fundamentally affected by the lighting that\u2019s put in. So we sometimes have to make very, very tiny adjustments to keep the emotional connection between the characters onscreen. That connected feel from character to character is what we fundamentally invest in as a viewer.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat\u2019s tougher, fire or water? I would assume water.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSAINDON You would think water. But fire is so unpredictable, and in every shot it can look a little different. And if the speed is a little off, if the exposure is a little off, then it\u2019s real easy for it to look wrong. There\u2019s a little more flexibility with water. It\u2019s still very difficult, but you can get away with a bit more for some reason.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBANEHAM We\u2019re so familiar with the fundamentals of water and the predictability of it. Fire depends on a lot of outside forces, and those outside forces \u2014 like fuel and wind \u2014 shift the very character of fire as you change them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSAINDON We spent a lot of time doing practical fire, too \u2014 a lot of flamethrowers.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tA water scene from the film.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of 20th Century Studios<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat is James Cameron particular about when it comes to looking at effects shots?<\/p>\n

\n\tSAINDON The thing he always asks is: \u201cWhat\u2019s this shot about?\u201d He\u2019s [worried if] an effect is too big, it\u2019s going to take away from the shot. Or if the lighting is too dark, you won\u2019t see the facial performance. We had gigantic shots in the third-act battle that showed three times as many [warriors] as we do in the final movie. But Jim wanted you to be able to follow the action of every single little battle that was happening in the background. If the shot gets too cluttered, you couldn\u2019t follow it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat\u2019s the shot Cameron agonized over, or went back and forth on the most?<\/p>\n

\n\tBANEHAM There were very few where we had that kind of iterative process. The effect that did take a couple of iterations was when we were developing the look for the [hallucinogenic drug trip tent scene with Varang and Stephen Lang\u2019s Miles Quaritch]. We spent a ton of time trying to work out the appropriate visual approach, and then Jim added a secondary effect, which was a rapid pulsing of the camera.<\/p>\n

\n\tFire and Ash was nominated for the Oscar for best costume. How would you respond to those who say, \u201cBut they\u2019re not actually wearing the costumes when they film\u201d?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBANEHAM We take real issue with that statement! [Costume designer] Deborah L. Scott and her team built almost 2,000 pieces of costume props. And then we actually did a huge amount of physical testing with the costumes. So every single thing you see that\u2019s represented in CGI was handwoven and then tested [with the actors] to understand its movement. There are a couple of departments that are overlooked because they have their final representation onscreen as CG, and that\u2019s just like saying our performers are not actors.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tPeylak (David Thewlis), Neytiri (Zoe Salda\u00f1a) and Jake Sully (Sam Worthington).<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of 20th Century Studios<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s a sense that Fire and Ash felt so photorealistic that it\u2019s roughly as good as Avatar is probably going to look for a possible fourth movie. Or do you think there will be another leap in VFX even when rendering the world of Pandora by then?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBANEHAM The quality of visual effects doesn\u2019t stop developing, but it has hit a level of visual reality that is pretty damn close to photographic. The subject that we\u2019re covering tends not to be real, and it\u2019s hard in that respect, but I think there\u2019s real room for improvement in the process and cleaning up the workflows. I also think [Avatar 4 and 5] have some real interesting challenges from a visual effects standpoint.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBARRETT The more you learn, the more you sort of learn the little things you don\u2019t know. The detail that you\u2019re chasing becomes smaller and smaller and smaller but in many ways becomes more and more important. So yeah, I think it can get better.<\/p>\n

\n\tSAINDON If we weren\u2019t pushing for more, most of our artists would get really bored.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tVarang (Chaplin). <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of 20th Century Studios<\/p>\n

\n\tThis story first appeared in a February stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Avatar saga\u2019s effects team has been wowing audiences for 17 years, so it\u2019s perhaps easy to take…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":281282,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[47050,10779,156,47052,409,111,139,69,2584,36526],"class_list":{"0":"post-281281","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-avatar-fire-and-ash","9":"tag-awards","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-james-cameron","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-new-zealand","14":"tag-newzealand","15":"tag-nz","16":"tag-oscars","17":"tag-oscars-2026"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281281\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/281282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}