It’s not easy to impress an Oscar-winning VFX master like John Bruno, but some of the CGI techniques used to create Avatar were so trippily innovative that after Bruno joined the film as one of its visual effects supervisors a year and a half ago, he repeatedly found himself shaking his head in awe.

In Part Two of our exclusive interview, Bruno, who has worked on all of James Cameron’s films since 1989, including Terminator 2, True Lies, and Titanic, tells 30 Ninjas Editor John Freeman Gill how the filmmakers pulled off the climactic battle scene that culminates with Colonel Quaritch taking on both Jake and Neytiri. (Spoiler Alert!)

Leaping Out of a Burning Warship and the Fight to the Death

30 NINJAS: You worked closely on the climactic fight sequence, where Colonel Quaritch straps into his amp suit, leaps out of his burning Dragon [warship] and goes after Jake in a fight to the death. How were the visual effects done in that sequence?

JB: Well, there were several different ships. The Dragon command ship, which is the lead command ship that Quaritch rides in, and the Valkyrie is the shuttle next to it, and the Samson and the Scorpions were the two different helicopters. The same way the motion capture suits worked, there were wire-frame mockups of these ships that had little reflective markers on them, and they were in different patterns so that the computers could recognize their positions [on the stage]. The [Pandoran flying creatures called] banshees also worked that way. I got to do that a couple of times with Jim on stage, where you actually walked around the [stage] with your hand—it’s like holding a model airplane and flying it around, except it’s a wireframe. You’d see it for real on the monitors, [with the animated banshees moving in the animated Pandoran forest, according to the way you moved the wireframes with your hands]. It’s the same technique as the motion capture I was describing except there’re no actors; it’s a couple of people walking around on stage interacting with these different wireframe mockups of these different vehicles and different-scaled banshees.

30 NINJAS: But what you’re getting on the monitor is a real-time version of what it looks like in the environment of Pandora?

JB: Yeah, and whatever banshee you’re holding has a pattern of reflectors on it that is for a specific banshee. So you could be holding two of them, and you’d see two different banshees on the monitor. So one might be blue with orange stripes or one might be green and so on. And you’d get the motion down, and then the lab guys would polish that up and clean up the path—if you bounced a little bit [while holding the wireframe mockup banshees or warships] they could clean that up. So the ship —everything—was done in advance. There was no model work done. Normally over the years I would’ve done motion control models, but this sort of eliminated that. Weta had already built all of the assets: all those jungles, the Hell’s Gate buildings, all the vehicles at Hell’s Gate, the shuttle, the Dragon [command ship], the Scorpion [helicopters], the amp suit, that was already built and under development. The physical 3-D objects existed. And they could easily be mocked up on the spot.

So that particular battle, Home Tree was done first. Then Jim spent a couple of weeks, we started to actually flesh out the fight, this big battle. Jim had some key moments that he wanted, as scripted, and basically, we started going through the scene and shooting on stage this way. Once that stuff was captured, then he would film it and find the angle. It was really fun, like once Jake has landed on the Dragon command ship and throws a grenade and blows out one of the engines, and it starts to spiral, that was fine, because the spiral was all in there and worked out, but Jim kept going back and finding the right angles to follow it, and we still owed interior shots of Quaritch getting into the amp suit and jumping out. But we had rough animation of that, it was given to the [New Zealand visual effects house] Weta. Weta animated it, gave it back, and then in April, I came back [from New Zealand to L.A.] for an April shoot where we actually shot Quaritch on stage, him in the amp suit. And what was so cool about that was, you can take the animation, you take those Maya [software] files, you’d have the animation move, and you’d have the motion-control move or the camera move, you could feed that into a motion-control system, put an actor in the [giant] amp suit torso that was rigged by [Virtual Production Supervisor] Glenn Derry on a motion base that would actually move based on the approved animation. So the actor was in for a ride! And the camera system would follow the camera move that was done. Now, the genius thing that I loved about this thing is, it’s a Simulcam system: There was a system that would show you the animated scene, the template—Jim could see that through his camera lens—the camera was synched up in the same volume, Jim could actually line up, knowing which lens was used, in stereo. He would walk [on the stage] with the actor … and he could see Stephen Lang as Quaritch in the amp suit with the animation amp suit locked together and the background that was around them.

30 NINJAS: So in a sense, he’s actually watching the film through the lens of the camera, and walking around to find the angles he likes.

JB: Exactly. [Laughs, with a kind of awe] That was what threw me. That was pretty spectacular.

Firing the Amp Suit Cannon, Brandishing the Giant Knife

30 NINJAS: What was most vivid in shooting that fight sequence with the amp suit?

JB: [The scene is] broken up [into different sections]: Stephen Lang, playing Colonel Quaritch, shoots at Jake [from his warship, the grenades [that Jake tossed into the ship] go off, blowing up Quaritch’s ship, Quaritch is kind of set on fire, he jumps into a full-size [giant] amp suit, and jumps down from the ship. … [On the stage where we were shooting the live action, there was] full-size mockup of the amp suit, 18 feet tall or whatever the hell it is. He actually climbed in that, but there was no background — it was all greenscreen, though you’d never know it looking at the movie. And he is partially on fire … the scene was divided into different sections, and once he was actually walking around in the suit (which was animated), that torso section, that piece, the arms were taken off, the legs were taken off, and it was put on a motion base. So the motion base made it walk as it was animated. Stephen Lang is basically a passenger. Stephen is holding his arms up as if he’s holding the cannon (which could only be seen on a monitor), but [in real life] Stephen is standing there [on stage] — there is no weapon, there are no [amp suit] arms; he’s inside the torso of the amp suit mockup. But on the monitors you can see [in real time] what the amp suit’s doing, because we have animation we’re matching to it. So he would pose his hands and his arms — Jim would pose Stephen Lang in the position needed to match what the arms were doing [in the animation]. So if [Quaritch] was raising the weapon [in the animation], Lang had to follow the movement of the animation. On stage, there’s nothing there but the torso he’s sitting in, so he’s posing to the animation that only Jim sees and we see. So when he grabs the knife he’s grabbing air, but in the overall scene that we’re actually watching through Simulcam on the monitors, he’s basically trying to match the movement of the preexisting animation. It was quite bizarre to watch.

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

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