Avatar Exclusive: Our Oscar-Winning VFX Insider Reveals How They Made Battle-Scarred Neytiri “Look Like Bruce Willis at the End of Die Hard” (Part 3)

Share on Facebook posted 01-07-10 by John Freeman Gill

In the final installment of our exclusive interview, Avatar Visual Effects Supervisor John Bruno explains how every scrape, cut, and bruise on the lithe body of ten-foot Na’vi warrior princess Neytiri is part of a meticulously compiled physical record of her violent interaction with the invading humans and the Pandoran wilderness.

Jungle Fever Without the Jungle

30 NINJAS: When you joined [the New Zealand digital effects house] Weta in doing visual effects for Avatar a year and a half ago, you were put to work on some of the climactic moments at the end of the film. What were the first shots you worked on that got final approval from Director James Cameron and Weta head Joe Letteri?

JOHN BRUNO: The first final that I got from Jim was the reflected mask. One thing that the film did not have was: 90 percent of the face masks that the humans had to wear were added digitally. The reason for that being that [back when they originally shot those scenes with the actors] no one actually knew what the environment [of Pandora] was; the jungle wasn’t finished. Everything was shot on a greenscreen stage, so what the actual environment was when they actually shot the movie, probably two years earlier, was this greenscreen and lights from this stage, so they just took the plexi portion of those masks out, and we had to add them all back in [digitally]. So the first shot with Jake, when Neytiri puts the mask on Jake and the oxygen gets turned on and you see some breath and it steams up — that was the first shot finaled for me. And that was done by Eric Lindquist at Weta; we got the look down [of the Pandoran environment reflected in the face mask]. And the next thing that happened was getting Neytiri — the biggest issue was, this was the first shot where we see a ten-foot Amazon Na’vi, Neytiri, and basically a five-foot-seven or five-foot-eight human that she’s holding in her arms, and it was originally shot with some guys in a greenscreen suit holding Sam Worthington [who plays Jake]. And when they actually got Zoe [Saldana, who plays Neytiri], she was holding a ten-year-old boy in a motion-capture suit to try to get the difference in scale. But the first thing we saw that sort of showed up — this was kind of our test-bed animation scene — the first thing we noticed in the design was we had this great sci-fi scenario of this ten-foot woman holding basically a broken human, his emaciated legs; he’s a cripple, but she loves his person, she loves his being. And she’s holding him, and her Na’vi hand was almost three times as big as a human hand [Laughs], and it looked really weird! So that turned into reducing all the hands, almost all of them [in the movie], reducing them by 50 percent based on that scene. [Laughs] I mean, there was a lot of weird stuff going on.

30 NINJAS: Because that scene was so important and you wanted to see the hands, you then had to make that scene work, and then you worked backwards to make it consistent throughout the whole film.

Warpaint for Neytiri’s Face, Scrapes for Her Inner Thighs

JB: Her warrior costume was also then being designed. We kind of had an idea of what that looked like, but then Jim, halfway through this, said, “You know what? They’re gonna be wearing warpaint.” And then I said to Jim, “Well, the warpaint in that particular sequence … I mean, here’s a scene where you have her lips quivering, her eyes are welling up, and she’s about to cry, and you’re gonna put paint on her face?” So Jim said, “I suggest you start with this scene, because this is your key scene.” So we immediately took the designs of her warpaint and had those [digitally] wrapped onto her face, and Jim didn’t like the first round. So that was designed again to what it ended up being in the movie — we started designing them based on the color of each character’s banshee [flying creature]. And then I said, “Well, wait a minute, we don’t know what the battle is yet, but she’s gonna be scraped up — I know she crashes her banshee.” We had these templates of that action; she had to be cut up, dirty, and bleeding. So I had the guys at Weta just sort of [try it a variety of ways, ranging] from little scrapes and a little dirt and little or no blood to too much: all the way at the other end of the spectrum — “Just go too far.” We had ten variations, and I showed them to Jim, and the very last one he goes, “The last one.”

30 NINJAS: The one where she’s most chewed up?

JB: Yeah, which is in the movie. I went, “Wow, I didn’t think you’d go that far.” He said, “She’s gotta look like Bruce Willis at the end of Die Hard.” So we used that, and once we had that image, and when I flew down to Weta with their art director we did full body based on that. We went through the movie [with Weta Visual Effects Supervisor] Steve Rosenbaum, and we looked at each scene: She’s teaching him to run through the jungle and jump down things — does she have scrapes, does she have scars? The first battle when she’s riding the Thanator, at the end she has scrapes on her inner thighs, she gets thrown against a tree, she has bruised her ribcage. I mean, all these things we started layering in sections: In this section [of the film] she looks like this, after she crashes her banshee she looks like this, and at the end she looks like this — based on nothing that had been shot yet.

30 NINJAS: So before any of this stuff was shot you were basically saying, “OK, she’s going to pick up these abrasions, these cuts, and so forth as she goes through, and then by the final sequence, she will have collected all this damage.”

JB: Yes, because we did that first. We did the end first and then had to go back through the movie to match. And it’s amazing that it all held together. So Jim approved, based on illustrations, all the way to the conclusion of the Jake vs. Colonel Quaritch in the amp suit fight, when she looks like this. So by the time you get to her holding Jake, for which we were finaling shots before we even shot the battle, this is what she’s gonna look like. [Laughs] It worked!

Check out the rest of our interview with VFX master John Bruno below:

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