Russell Carpenter, ASC on Avatar: The Way of Water, working with James Cameron, creating realistic lighting for a virtual world

Our guest Russell Carpenter, ASC comes back for a second time on
the podcast to talk about Avatar: The Way of Water. When
cinematographer Russell Carpenter began working on Avatar: The Way
of Water, it was much different from any other film experience he'd
had. Russell had previously worked with director Jim Cameron on
True Lies and Titanic, which won him the Academy Award for Best
Cinematography. He began working on Avatar: The Way of Water before
they even rolled cameras, testing and integrating the world of live
action capture with completely virtual images. The process was like
a huge layer cake of world creation, with writing, concept art and
production design all being developed simultaneously. As the
cinematographer, Russell's primary concern was making sure that the
lighting design on the live, motion captured actors looked real and
played well with the CGI generated world. It's hard to fool the eye
when people instinctively know what sunlight, water and shade in a
forest should look like, so every scene with a live person and a
Na'vi person had to be exactly right. It was important to Cameron
that everything on Pandora be grounded in reality. The animals had
to move realistically and the interplay of shade and light in the
forests needed to feel real to an audience so that they would have
an emotional connection, rather than watching an alien-feeling,
fake-looking science fiction world. The entire process of making
Avatar: The Way of Water was a huge puzzle, with a small army of
teams working on different parts of the movie and simply trying
different things. As the writing and story development continued,
Cameron would decide they needed a certain scenario or plot point,
and he would ask the teams to creatively figure out how to make it
happen. After the locations were computer generated, several
virtual cameras were used to shoot multiple angles to get an idea
of the blocking, lighting and camera placement for the CGI action.
Finally, the actors came in to do motion capture and read their
lines. Russell thought he'd start to see scenes coming together,
but everything was such a piecemeal process that he watched the
virtual camera material to get an idea of how the lighting was
matching and coming together. They would move lights around on
automated overhead trusses in the studio to change the lighting for
each scene and to keep as many lights out of the blue screen shots
as possible. You can see Avatar: The Way of Water in a variety of
formats in theaters everywhere. Find Russell Carpenter: Instagram
@russellcarpenterasc Hear Cinepod's first interview with Russell
Carpenter, ASC: https://www.camnoir.com/ep40/ Sponsored by Hot Rod
Cameras: www.hotrodcameras.com Sponsored by Greentree Creative:
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