How Avatar 1&2 Where Made
By: Dorothy Hamilton
The first Avatar movie came out on Dec 18, 2009, recently (Dec 16, 2022) the sequel came out titled Avatar way of the water. Both the movies are popular to this day, the first one being the second highest grossing movie, but one question that still leaves people wondering. How were these movies created?
If you don't know, Avatar is a movie about humans traveling to another planet, Pandora, and turning themselves into Avatars to mine unobtainium. The Avatars are the natives of Pandora, they are blue nine to ten feet tall creatures that slightly resemble humans. Unobtainium, the reason humans travel to Earth, is a substance that generates energy on earth which is worth lots of money.
Avatar movie banner.
Photo of actor with the suit on compared to final product.
Now that you know what Avatar is, we can finally answer the question, how did they create ten foot tall creatures with blue skin? Well, they used multiple things to create the Avatars however one of the main things they used was CGI. During the scene where an Avatar was present the actors would wear suits and helmets that helped them take the shape of the avatars. The helmets would have the ears attached to it and would be all black, just like the suits. After all the scenes were filmed they would go through and edit the characters wearing suits and turn them into the Avatars. They would also do the same for the setting, putting a green screen in the background and go back and edit it into the planet of pandora.
Another thing Avatar had to do was for their second movie, majority of the scenes in Avatar way of the water had water in it, some scenes even involved the characters swimming. However, one of the main factors of Avatar's popularity was how realistic it looked. CGI water can look quite unrealistic sometimes so to solve this problem they just used real water, simple enough right? Well, it was a little less simple than that, technically they did use CGI water for some of the scenes to make those scenes work they had the actors hanging from wires and pretending to swim. Otherwise they did use real water and just wore the CGI suits underwater.
Photos of actors swimming in real water for an underwater scene.
Photo of Mr. Anspaugh and his dog max.
Before reading that part did you ever think about how Avatar was made? Well sixth grade teacher Mr. Anspaugh has, “I saw the first Avatar when it came out in theaters in I-max 3D” He also said, “visually it was amazing, I don’t remember too much about the story I just liked it”. “I remember at the time reading about Motion-capture or Mo-cap and it was kind of a newer style of special effect,” said Mr. Anspaugh when asked if he had thought about how Avatar was made .
So, have you seen Avatar? If you have, have you ever considered how they made the world of pandora come to life? This film idea and making did come into play with many movies that were made after Avatar. This was a huge new way of movie creation and was very helpful later.
Contributor Bio
Dorothy Hamilton is a sixth grader here at EJHS, she loves summer, swimming and all things art.