The Last Airbender will carve a unexampled route in optical effects , showing you thing no moving picture ever has : water tentacle and blow of fervidness . We visited Industrial Light and Magic , and see what every other movie will be copy soon .
Whether Airbender satisfies fans of the definitive Nickelodeon cartoon , and whether it succeed in being a Star Wars for a new generation , one matter ’s clear after spending the 24-hour interval at ILM : It ’s blend to be an innovative film from a VFX view , maybe as groundbreaking ceremony as The Matrix was in its day . Here are seven things the ILM team showed a group of jaw reporter a couple of months ago :
1 ) flame that actually looks like fire . This is a good deal hard than it sounds . ocular effects supervisor Pablo Helman recount that he hold out outside and ignite some stuff and nonsense on fervor , so he would have a bunch of studies of real fire to show to music director M. Night Shyamalan . But when Helman show the footage of actual fire to Shyamalan , his answer was , “ You make love what ? That fire looks CG . ” Even actual fire looked fake .
“ [ Shyamalan ] did n’t opine he was ever really convert by CG fire in a movie , ” says digital compositor Barry Williams .
What was the resolution to creating flame that looked credible , and was able-bodied to “ flex ” in a way that still looked naturalistic ? burn Man ! The designers engender hold of some footage from the one-year neo - hippie festival in Nevada , in which someone is controlling a pillar of blast , and scarcely hold back it in check . That footage gave the designers a clue to how to show the same signified of power and mastery , not to cite the construction of fire , in a simulation .
2 ) show pee float in a believable way . Another really challenging component to show being bent was water — the designers searched for age to happen some reference films for this element . They wander up with some YouTube picture , including one demonstrate a bozo punching through a water balloon , and one showing a guy being hit in the head with a water balloon in slow - motion .
Finally , they reach the motherlode : A NASA video of urine in zero gravity .
The ILM crew exhibit us a video of Katara learning to bend water , filmed in Greenland . A ball of water system flies out of the ocean and Katara tries to keep ascendency over it . It starts to dribble and finally lose its physique tout ensemble . The messy water bubble flies through the air , and it does look telling . It falls on her friend , and he ’s pissed .
A later scene shows a professional of waterbending fighting , with snakes of water everywhere , and tentacle coming out of a steam pot . Katara misrepresent the water to make out out of some urn and insure the vicious Prince Zuko , then freeze him . He looks around apprehensively , and then he ’s encased in ice-skating rink .
3 ) Figuring out what “ zephyr ” reckon like . The whole point of Aang is that he ’s an airbender , so what does it face like when you bend air travel ? Is it like a blow of wind ? Is it like cloud ? In the end , the ILM squad decided that what you desire to see is what the air is pull up — whether it ’s dust or coke , count on what surround Aang is in . They used the same algorithm for air that they ’d used for fervor , except that they did n’t render it as fire .
We visualise some trial footage showing Aang , with his hand link up , run around a way and climbing a wall while Prince Zuko shot fireball at him . In another scene , Zuko shoots fireballs at Aang , who ’s spin and wave his hands , using air to turn away them . In another panorama , Aang is fence by spinning doors , and the Fire Nation is attack him . He use blasts of air to shut the door , and we saw how they rendered the line of air .
“ With the bend of the constituent , you want to match the movement and the carrying out of the actor , ” says VFX supervisor Christian Alzmann . “ You could n’t really depart designing until you had that performance in the can . ”
The film - makers also adjudicate that every type of “ bend ” should have its own soldierly arts style , just like a good Kung - fu moving picture has the Crane style or the Dragon style .
Also , whenever someone certify one of the element , he or she has to do it in a manner that ’s personal . We have to see it as an university extension of their personality .
4 ) Momo , a CG beast with a real front . In The Last Airbender , Aang has a preferred flying lemur named Momo . The guy who lend Momo to living in this movie , Tim Harrington , also animated the famous sequence of Yoda attacking Count Dooku in Star Wars Episode II : Attack Of The Clones .
Noah Ringer , who encounter Aang , carry around a blue - screen bag that stand in for Momo . But when it do to place Momo into the scenes , pronounce Harrington , they had to ensure that Momo could really interact with Aang . The VFX gang spent a quite a little of time at the zoo observe veridical lemur . Then they shot footage of Noah mime with an notional lemur — sometimes he had to pull his arm in a small so that the lemur ’s limbs would have a place to go . “ We really call for to have intercourse where his head is , where his shoulders are , where his arms were going to be , ” says Harrington .
The voiceless part was Momo ’s wings , which are ground on a bat ’s . Harrington spent a lot of clock time figuring out how to get the light to disperse through Momo ’s wing tissue layer . The mechanics of how Momo flies were based on the giant fruit chiropteran , which Harrington project was rough the same weight . But the wing had to be able to shut down up and disappear when Momo was n’t using them . In an early paradigm , they amaze out over Momo ’s forearm , but then the designers folded the wings one more time , “ so they folded nicely over the forearm , ” says Harrington .
Here ’s a new telecasting spot that reach your good glance of Momo so far :
5 ) A six - legged creature that walk of course . There ’s no such affair as a six - legged mammalian in nature , although patently insects are six - legged . So realizing Appa , the six - legged flight bison , was a major challenge , says Harrington . Early versions of Appa were “ a morsel too far off - model from the show , ” he add together , but the show ’s creators and Shyamalan direct the VFX crew back to the show ’s theoretical account .
consort to Harrington :
We looked at opposite bears , and we thought of the front two legs as arms that are set off slimly , and the back legs are legs … We look at opposite bear , bison [ and ] elephant to get kind of the physics and the weighting right . We also looked at beavers . There are scenes where he in reality swims and kind of uses his beaver tail in the water .
He showed us an early visualization in which Appa hovers in mid - airwave and a group of child are hanging from his hand . Appa is looking over his shoulder , as if to say , “ Let ’s get going . ” It starts as just a group of fry dangling in mid - gentle wind on a greenscreen , holding onto hangers that will be Appa ’s wrist pivots . Appa is sum up piece by part , including his fur which react to the idle words , and his face , which has to be expressive and obviously healthy — but not too human , or Appa becomes “ creepy . ”
“ [ Shyamalan ] cerebrate of him as the giving quiet kid in the socio-economic class , who ’s really quiet and tranquil and proceed it together , but if a couple other kids get in a fight , he might be the one who steps in and go on the peace of mind , ” say Harrington . “ Kind of a gentle titan . ”
Harrington and other designers faced similar challenges creating the Komodo rhino , which the Fire Nation people mount into battle — existent Komodo dragons “ have kind of a dorky walk of life , ” so the graphic designer go for something cheeseparing to a English bulldog ’s movements . He designate us an incredibly intricate composite CG shot of a Firebender riding a Komodo rhino off a ship , up a rampart and over the top , where it shoot down firing down at the people inside a walled city .
6 ) Facial question capture . James Cameron ’s Avatar already bear on the envelope as far as appropriate an worker ’s performance and translating it to CG locomote , but Airbender may go even further . If you do n’t acknowledge when Aang is n’t being played by Noah Ringer , then Harrington and his crew will have succeeded .
There are actually three Aangs in the motion picture . There ’s Ringer , who ’s an completed warriorlike artist and actually plays the character most of the time . There ’s his stunt double Jade , a girl who ’s roughly the same sizing and shape as Ringer , but you could kind of secern in some of the raw footage that it ’s not really Ringer . And then there ’s a CG rendering of Aang , who ’s doing some of the crazy tumbling and radical - dangerous stunt that no actor or stunt - someone can do . We saw one scene where Aang fly the Fire Nation and runs and skips across a whole lot of pier , which tilt realistically , and you’re able to see that it ’s a long , long way down — this sequence is all CG , and there ’s a moment where the soma - and - blood Aang drops out of frame for a second , and then reappears as CG Aang .
To put Ringer ’s face onto the other Aangs , Harrington captured a closeup of Ringer scowling and grimacing , with a billion dots to capture every aspect of the performance . This is n’t just like Benjamin Button , Harrington points out — they did n’t just have to put Brad Pitt ’s performance onto the old Benjamin Button without occupy if it was a perfect fit . “ This has to be a one - to - one couple , ” order Harrington . “ This takes the geometry and shrink - wraps it , like stagnant on , to these dots , and animate it to the dots . ” So Noah ’s read/write head is add to liven Aang , and in one or two cases , to the stunt - Aang , Jade .
7 ) create digital environments that feel like an extension service of the real footage . The localisation the photographic film visits are found around the styles of the different tribe — so for example , when you travel to the Northern Air Temple , you see a lot of precipice and mesas that only an airbender can reach . “ They have the kites and they can control the air currents , ” says Alzmann . The output squad studied a lot of temples in Burma and Cambodia and had someone in reality do some filming in Vietnam , to make each dig expect as real as possible .
Alzmann showed us one stroke that take off with a literal valley , and then a computer get temple and bridge were layer in — the tabernacle is being sack by the Fire Nation . In general , the squad have a “ less is more ” overture to layering in data processor - generated details to all the tantrum , aiming for the most photorealistic images they could create . It was all part of the cause to make rural Pennsylvania and Greenland await like Asia .
Likewise , we see the huge armada of the Fire Nation , but the only strong-arm property was a curt section of deck , and then the VFX team added the rest digitally .
The filmmakers put a batch of piece of work into create the contrast between the Southern Water Tribe and the Northern Water Tribe — you see that the Southern Water Tribe has lost everything and ca n’t bend weewee very well any more , so they ’re stuck pretend iglu . Meanwhile , the Northern Water Tribe is the last citadel of free benders who have n’t been captured by the Fire Nation , and their buildings have more ornamentation . Their architecture is loosely based on Tibet , and Alzmann and Barry Williams put a lot of opinion into creating a layout of their city that felt like hoi polloi could actually live there .
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