How ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ Achieved Those Epic Aquatic Visual Effects
variety.comTim Gray Senior Vice President “Avatar: The Way of Water” is a sequel, but the VFX team had a mandate far beyond supplying “more of the same.” The follow-up to the 2009 original “Avatar” had many new demands — and these jaw-dropping innovations have helped make the film one of the top box-office films of all time.
Joe Letteri, heading up his team at Weta FX, tells Variety, “We were working on this film since the last one finished, identifying what we could do better.
Then there was a big burst of research-and-development” about six years ago, when writer-director James Cameron delivered the scripts for this and three more sequels; that’s when they realized the full scope of the film, which takes place in water about 60% of the time.
For the first “Avatar,” they had developed a tool kit to simulate water. “But we knew it wasn’t going to be good enough,” says Letteri. “In facial closeups, for example, you have water running down the skin.
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