In the long-awaited sea-quel "Avatar: The Way of Water," now in theaters, James Cameron delivers on his promise to explore Pandora's glittering oceans 13 years after the historic success of 2009's hybrid live-action/motion-capture epic "Avatar." But bringing the blockbuster follow-up to life required the Oscar-winning filmmaker, cinematographer Russell Carpenter and a team of actors, experts and technicians to achieve the "impossible" yet again.
Their biggest challenge? Hint: It covers 71% of Earth's surface.
In 2013, Cameron, armed with thousands of pages of notes expanding the world of Pandora, decided on the aquatic setting and set a team of writers to pen the sequels. But Jon Landau, who has produced all of Cameron's films since "Titanic," immediately foresaw a problem: The technological processes used to capture actors playing Na'vi on dry sets did not yet exist for capturing them wet. "Right away we started doing R&D," he said, "because no one had ever done performance capture underwater."
