The unseen craft behind Avatar: Fire and Ash

Wednesday, 24 December 2025

On the big screen, Avatar: Fire and Ash is a rush of volcanic landscapes, soaring creatures and Na’vi crowds that feel impossibly alive.

Off screen, it’s the result of years of painstaking collaboration between costume makers, animators and visual effects artists, many of them working out of Aotearoa.

From almost 20,000 costume designs across the franchise to villages populated by hundreds of unique characters, the latest film in the series represents one of the most ambitious creative undertakings so far.

Academy Award-winning costume designer of Titanic Deborah Scott, who is based in Los Angeles, worked with Wellington-based Wētā Workshop to conceptualise more than 18,000 designs across the three Avatar films.

Workshop staff combined digital hand-crafting with modern technologies to create more than 3000 physical costume items for the Avatar sequels. Its costume work on Fire and Ash began in 2017.

Scott, who was brought on part-way through the first Avatar film before its 2009 release, said director-writer James Cameron had asked early on, for the majority of costumes for the films to be created in full.

When work began on The Way of Water, Scott said it became clear that her team would have to make all the costumes by hand ‒ the Windtraders’ leader Peylak (David Thewlis) personally wears 803 pieces of dyed string and decorative beads.

“Even the cloth that you’ll find in the Windtraders is all hand loomed on different kinds of looms, and some of the threads are even spun, so we take it really seriously,” Scott said.

Many of the intricate designs are drawn from real-life inspirations and references, particularly the military and hospital uniforms. But the true creative challenge was designing costumes for the indigenous Na’vi cultures.

Research includes a deep dive into a character’s environment ‒ for the oceanic Metkayina clan, for example, clothing is made from materials found near the sea - flax, sea shells, sea plants. Designs are drawn on paper before they’re finalised and finally, crafted.

Fire and Ash also introduces the violent Mangkwan clan, that calls a stark and barren volcanic landscape home. Scott’s team used a minimal selection of materials for their aesthetic: body paint, ash, clay, grease, plus touches of aged wood, rock, and some feathers for Varang (Oona Chaplin). The clan was also covered in scars and adorned with gnarly piercings.

Then there’s the other small but rich visual details: Neytiri, played by Zoe Saldaña, wears her dead son’s necklace, and sometimes his cloak.

Scott said it’s all about trying to define the characters in a particular place and time. “Each and every time, we take each and every piece so seriously,” she said.

Meanwhile, eight teams and more than 1200 Wētā FX crew worked on Fire and Ash’s VFX and animation. The Wellington-headquartered organisation was responsible for 94% of the film’s VFX shots.

Its teams integrated a live action human character in Spider (Jack Champion) into a digital world in 3D, plus created new environments including the riverbed, swamp, the Ash Village and the Cove of Ancestors for Fire and Ash.

Animation artists also helped bring to life an increased number and size of creatures, plus numerous characters and vehicles in Fire and Ash’s big and highly complex battle scenes.

A single shot featured 241 Tsyong, giant squid-like creatures that have tentacles that are notoriously difficult to animate.

Oscar-winning Daniel Barrett, senior animation supervisor at Wētā FX, said those who worked on the film did not back down from any challenge. “We might find that a facial rig can’t quite achieve what the actor’s done on the day. We don’t back away from that ‒ we fix the rig.”

Animators “fed off” the actors’ energy, particularly the sexy, unique performance delivered by Chaplin, when bringing the Na’vi ears and tails to life. “This is what Oona gave to Varang, and then the animators honoured that.”

Eric Saindon, senior VFX supervisor with Wētā FX, said Cameron even wanted actions in the backgrounds of scenes to be consistent from shot to shot.

But the director would also get into great detail on the technical and atmospheric aspects of how things like the Flux Vortex at the end of Fire and Ash actually worked, to ensure the physics behind everything were correct.

Scott said the Avatar movies would always be really special, not just for the fact they’re hugely popular, but for the amount of soul and creativity that has been poured into them by so many skilled people.

“[To] be able to produce what I think is really high quality work with really high quality people, is just a thing in itself. … It will forever be a part of my life. It’s changed my life. It’s made me a better person. It’s made me a better designer. It’s made me really appreciate others, and the communal storytelling that we can do together.”

By the numbers

• Wētā FX’s work on the film used a total disk space of 140 petabytes (140,000 terabytes)

• Fire and Ash features more than 2000 water FX shots. It also features more than 1000 digital fire FX shots, ranging from flaming arrows and flamethrowers to explosions and tornadoes

• Only 7 shots in Fire and Ash, totalling around 11 seconds of the film, do not contain VFX

• One crowd scene in Fire and Ash features 536 Na’vi characters

• Across all the characters, more than 30,000 adornments were dressed into hair and kuru (biological appendages resembling braided ponytails)

• Fire and Ash is Wētā FX’s first project that required accurately matched and fully simulated armpit hair