Over a three-year period, Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) and Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025) were filmed simultaneously in New Zealand and California, beginning in September 2017 and wrapping in late 2020. While reshoots followed, the back-to-back production provided a consistent look for character appearances, specifically Spider (Jack Champion), a teenage “pinkskin” living on Pandora. With a compressed timeline, the visual effects department leaned on established tools and workflows to complete over 3,000 VFX shots for the third installment of director James Cameron’s franchise.
Fire and Ash picks up where Way of Water left off. The Sully family is in hiding, living with the Metakyina while dealing with the loss of Neteyam (Jamie Flatters). After deciding to take Spider back to the Omatikaya village, they are attacked by the Mangkwan clan, aka the Ash People, led by Varang (Oona Chaplin), a group of raiders who lost everything to a volcano. The fallout triggers old foes working with new enemies as the Sullys and Metakyina fight again for survival.
Below, senior visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri, visual effects supervisor Richard Baneham, Weta FX senior visual effects supervisor Eric Saindon, and Weta FX senior animation supervisor Daniel Barrett unpack how the villainous Ash People were brought to screen.
New facial animation technology introduced in The Way of Water improved the nuances of performance capture. Did the team find things to tweak for Fire and Ash?
Joe Letteri: It was pretty minimal, and the reason was that we were pretty happy with the way it worked out on Avatar 2. We didn’t want to kind of break what we already had. But for Varang, we were able to roll out a few user-side updates rather than the engine itself, making it easier for the artists to interpret and edit the facial.
Daniel Barrett: As Joe says, there were things that helped with usability, so the tool was the same. The interface was a little bit different, which were welcomed tweaks as far as the team was concerned.
Richard Baneham: The other thing is that when we have a rhythm, we don’t want to mess with it. You very rarely get to make the same movie again. We have to extend the movie. We were at full steam when we finished Avatar 2, so the system we had in place allowed us to carry the rhythm into the third film, which is phenomenal.
Since you mentioned Varang, what went into creating her character and the Ash people?
Joe Letteri: Early on, it was a lot of broad strokes, like the headdress and what kind of makeup we were going to go with. These things were happening on the stage too.
Richard Baneham: That’s right. We were trying to dial in the color palette, working with the art department and getting the balance of the look of the costume, even if only a crude representation. We wanted to know if it was a uniform color, if the ash turned into a matted mess, the oiliness of the reds, and the look of her headdress.
Joe Letteri: Then Eric dealt with a lot of the real details with Jim, like dialing in the skin texture.
Eric Saindon: We actually got models and painted them up and put them in similar costumes, because once you actually see the makeup on a person in proper lighting, sometimes the different materials act differently in the light. And they actually give you a different look on her face. What’s great is that once we got the performance on her model and Jim started seeing it come through, it all just plugged together for him. She just became this amazing character that everyone loved.
Daniel Barrett: It was pretty amazing to show Jim Varang for the first time and get the kind of response that we got. To see Oona’s [Chaplin] performance sort of drop fully formed the first time out was a buzz for him and a real buzz for us to see his response.
Varang flies on a large aerial predator called a Nightwraith. What went into developing the creature?
Richard Baneham: With [lead creature designer] Zach Berge we designed a riff on a tetrapteron but we wanted her to have something unique. The primary difference was the engagement of the multiple veins and the steering mechanism and how it initiates is slightly different. Then obviously getting off the ground, she’s got slightly different legs so she can propel herself quite well. She has great talons. She makes for a great fighting creature. So the language really came from that sort of design and the need to tell the story to make it a wicked character for Neytiri to have to stand up to.
What inspired the look of the Ash clan’s barren village?
Eric Saindon: Jim actually had reference footage from a film he shot after the volcano went off in Vanuatu. He went there and shot a documentary, and it’s a very similar look to Ash village. He had video of kids playing in the ash, kicking it up, and walking around, and everything was just decimated. It was all white. I mean, it was terrible, but also beautiful in a weird way. That was definitely his inspiration for a lot of that whole Ash area.
Richard Baneham: We always harken back to a terrestrial reference. It’s one of the things that helps ground the audience in the visuals. So whilst it looks alien, it also looks incredibly real or credible. There are a couple of things about the village that are really interesting. Varang’s yurt. If you look at the yurt design, it’s very unusual. The next time you look at it, take a good look at the opening and see what you recognize.
What do you think audiences will take away from this third film?
Richard Baneham: The intention is to really have people hopefully feel like if they didn’t pay for a movie, they’d pay for an experience. There’s something in there for everyone. It’s not a one-size-fits-all kind of movie. Broadening that demographic is always very hard, but I think Jim has always had the master touch of including everybody.
Joe Letteri: You’ve got multiple cultures, and then within each culture, except for the Ash People, you have multiple generations. So you kind of get it in two different dimensions, and he manages to keep all those moving nicely.
Eric Saindon: My four kids are from 12 to 21, and they all got something different out of the film. Some of them are dark, some are fun and exciting. It was interesting to see what impacted all of them a little bit differently.
Avatar: Fire and Ash is currently in theaters.
Featured image: Oona Chaplin as Varang in 20th Century Studios’ AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2025 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.
