Avatar: The Tangled Web of Who Did What
Thursday, January 21st, 2010 I have dealt with a massive storm of controversy lately regarding who did what on the Na’Vi designs for the film ‘Avatar’. This open letter is being posted to clarify, once and for all, exactly what my involvement was in the creation of these characters.
In the Spring of 2005, I was contacted by Lightstorm Entertainment to be involved in the very first design steps towards creating the world of Pandora, the planet that ‘Avatar’ takes place on. There were only four of us in that initial phase (five if you count Martin Laing, the production designer at the time.)
These four were:
Wayne Barlowe, who was to take the initial creature and character design lead on the film.
Yuri Bartoli, a very talented illustrator and designer who I had worked with previously at Tippett Studios in Berkeley, California.
Neville Paige, an imaginative creature and industrial designer who was also a very fine draftsman.
And, me.
We started out working directly at Jim’s house in Malibu, and from the very start, I was frustrated because Jim wanted everything to be designed either on the computer or on paper. Sculpture being my forte, I felt a bit out of place; I design almost exclusively in clay. I can draw, but compared to Wayne, Yuri and Neville, my drawings just weren’t at their level. I tried to impress this upon Jim, but he was adamant: No clay!
After several weeks of trying to make this work, it was clear that I wasn’t cut out for this job, at least the way that Jim wanted it done, and I left the project for about four months. (I was delighted that, after leaving, Jim called me personally and told me that if the need came up for my skills, he would like to call on me in the future.)
Around November of ’05, Jim came back to me, this time frustrated at the inability of the computer to capture the life he wanted in his creatures and characters.
I came back, where designs for the creatures were all well underway under the lead of Neville Paige. The Na’Vi, however, had not been explored very thoroughly, at least not to Jim’s satisfaction. I started by doing a quick bust of the main female character, Neytiri. Jim immediately said upon seeing it, “This is really helpful…yes, this is a good approach.”
Next, Jim gave me a massive stack of photos of various actresses that he felt looked Neytiri-like. These were reference for me, as well as a drawing he had done of her face on toned paper. I did one bust that was an almost exacting portraiture of the drawing, and Jim had me make molds of it so there could be multiples. Next, he wanted a full-body rendition of her. This maquette was based on some very rough computer renderings, all of which Jim was dissatisfied with. His main objective in bringing me on was to get the sense of naturalness he felt existed in the sculptures he’d seen of mine. (Somewhere in all this, I also did a number of sculptures of the creatures as well, based on designs done by Yuri and Neville.)
The full body sculpture of Neytiri was a major success. Jim said, “That’s her.” He told me that I was “incapable of sculpting anything without character”, a very high compliment.
After this, Jim decided that he wanted me to concentrate specifically on the anatomy designs of the characters, and that he wanted Stan Winston’s guys to join the team as the primary designers of the faces and patterns on the Na’Vi bodies. They produced an enormous amount of work, including life-sized busts of the characters, and a full-sized Na’Vi body over nine feet tall. John Rosengrant headed up the team at Stan’s, and Joe Pepe, Chris Swift and Scott Patton all worked on the designs and sculptures being produced there, as well as a number of complex digital assets. They also made molds of all of the maquettes that I had done, and produced painted versions, with the now fully designed faces they had created replacing the rather rough ones I had sculpted. (These painted maquettes can be seen briefly in a “60 Minutes” episode.) Stan’s also produced the life-sized Mech suit (!), as well as a number of maquettes of the creatures for the film.
In the Spring of 2007, my involvement in ‘Avatar’ was drawing to a close, and I left satisfied with the work I had done. Weta Workshop worked heavily on the film as well, of course, producing set pieces, all of the Na’Vi accoutrements, native jewelry, the jaw-dropping animation (along with the legendary ILM) and refined things in the final analysis; the spirit and structure of my early maquettes was still intact in the Na’Vi, however. Unfortunately, I do not believe that my credit on the film reflects my contribution…but at least I can say that I was a major part of this fantastic design team. This is as thorough and honest an evaluation of what happened as I can recall. Let the controversy end now, for the love of Neytiri!
