PRODUCTION AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH
F ire and Ash (2025) is the third the conflict on Pandora escalates as Jake and Neytiri’s family encounter a new, aggressive Na’vi tribe (the Mangkwan clan) led by Varang. Russell Carpenter, ASC first worked with Cameron on the 1994 film True Lies . “After that, I shot the test for Titanic,” he begins. “Someone else was going to do it, then it turned around and landed in my lap again which was very fortunate.” It wasn’t until The Way of Water that the two would collaborate again. They shot it and Fire and Ash simultaneously. instalment in James Cameron’s Avatar franchise. Following the events of The Way of Water (2022), Filming for both began as early as 2017 and wrapped in 2020, with extra pick-up dates required for Fire and Ash . “It is such an outlier to almost everything else done recently,” Carpenter says. “It is its own ecosystem doing these films.”
THE BIG GUNS Avatar: The Way of Water is one of many projects Russell Carpenter and James Cameron have teamed up on
Carpenter describes how the initial steps of the Avatar films centre around the script. Production designers then start workshopping ideas, which they present to the director. “Jim [Cameron] then does virtual location scouting with his virtual camera,” adds Carpenter. “The whole planet of Pandora is built in
computers. When Jim walks out on the stage it is obviously quite a bland and empty space, but he will start pointing the virtual camera in different directions and suddenly you will see these big monitors all over the place and there will be all of these amazing waterfalls and so on.”
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