“Avatar” follows the journey of Jake Sully, a paralyzed former marine recruited to help a strip-mining operation on an extra-terrestrial moon. The harsh yet beautiful terrain of Pandora is home to an indigenous race known as the Na’vi. Jake’s mission is to infiltrate the Na’vi in the hope of enlisting their help. To succeed he must make use of a new technology that enables him to inhabit the body of a genetically bred Na’vi. This “avatar” allows Jake to escape his wheelchair and walk again.
To make the film possible, Weta Digital faced two major challenges. First, the world of Pandora had to be brought to life, complete with alien creatures, vegetation and landscapes. Second, a cast of unique digital characters had to be created, characters that could convey the emotional weight of the story and express the subtleties of each actor’s performance.
“Avatar” is not a typical effects movie, where visual effects are used principally to enhance and support the live action. There are entire scenes of the movie that have no live action; everything you see uses photo-realistic CG to create the world of Pandora.
Pandora is a dense, lush jungle filled with exotic vegetation and wildlife. Weta put this jungle environment together with thousands of digital assets and hundreds of characters and creatures moving through it. We used custom-developed software to paint the finest details of virtually every leaf in the jungle. To tell the story effectively requires the audience to relate to each Na’vi character on the same emotional level they would for a live actor.
Weta Digital devised a system of capturing each actor’s performance and translating it to their Na’vi counterpart with the highest level of detail. Getting faces right was a particular challenge. Making that happen required us to reinvent the world of motion-capture animation. This included new techniques using a virtual stage and camera where the actor’s performance translates to the digital character’s performance in real-time. Animators added ear and neck animation to complement the facial performance and we key-framed finger, hand, and tail animation.
The eyes being “the window to the soul” are the cornerstone of any believable CG character.There’s also a complex set of textures definingveins and skin blemishes. One of the most visually elaborate shaders we have allows each character’s eyes to react to light in an incredibly realistic fashion.

Joe Letteri – Senior Visual Effects Supervisor; Eileen Moran – Visual Effects Producer; Eric Saindon – Visual Effects Supervisor; Dan Lemmon – Visual Effects
Supervisor; Guy Williams – Visual Effects Supervisor

Weta Digital (NZ) is a world-leading visual-effects company based in Wellington, which provides a full suite of digital production services for feature films and high-end commercials, from concept design to cutting-edge 3D animation. Weta was formed in 1993 by a group of young New Zealand film makers, including Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor and Jamie Selkirk. It later split into two specialized halves – Weta Digital (digital effects) and Weta Workshop (physical effects). Weta provided visual effects for Peter Jackson’s blockbuster movies “The Lord of the Rings trilogy”, “King Kong” and many other Hollywood productions among them “I, Robot”, “X-Men: The Last Stand”, “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, and “The Lovely Bones”. Most recently Weta Digital has completed work on James Cameron’s “Avatar ”.