How the Avatar team created the fantastic world of Fire and Ash
The films co-production designer walks through how real-life organisms offer inspiration for the world of Pandora.
It’s no secret that celebrated filmmaker and National Geographic Explorer at Large James Cameron’s fantastical world of Pandora mirrors our planet Earth and imagines its inhabitants in a more harmonious relationship with their environment. And with Disney's Avatar: Fire and Ash hitting theaters on December 19, viewers will meet an exciting host of new clans and animals. (Disney is the parent company of National Geographic.)
One intriguing creature in the film doubles as a mode of transport used by a new clan called the Wind Traders. The blimp-like being—known as a Medusoid—soars through the sky, its translucent wings outspread, as it carries its precious passengers.
“It's basically like a galleon pirate ship hanging from a giant jellyfish,” says Dylan Cole, the film’s co-production designer who helped create this peculiar life-form.
(The seas of Avatar: James Cameron on the real science behind his fictional world.)
Though the creatures in these films are fictional, the process of bringing them to life is closer to science than you might think. Here’s how the artists behind the movie created the bizarre, and often bioluminescent, creatures within Avatar’s world of Pandora.
The process of building a new world
The central figures in Avatar are an alien species called the Na’vi, who have a deep relationship with the natural world. They often form close bonds with the creatures around them—with the Medusoid being one of the film’s newest.
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As part of the team bringing them to life, Cole takes the seeds of director Cameron’s ideas and helps them blossom into fully formed creations. Cameron sometimes “has a blurry vision,” says Cole. “It's our job to bring it into focus.”
At the outset, the team often doesn’t know exactly what they’re aiming for. “It's like doing a portrait of one of his kids without having met them,” he says. Intuition guides them to the finished product.
Thankfully, nature provides the best inspiration. Copying the natural world is “a strategy that's worked for a long time,” says Leif Ristroph, an experimental physicist at New York University, who wasn’t involved in the film but often bases his own research on living organisms. “You can look to nature to expand the types of solutions that you could dream about.”
Although Avatar is science fiction, the designers try to see the world within it as a real place, taking snippets from Earth and reimagining or recontextualizing them. “It's pretty arrogant to think, in an afternoon sketch, that we could do better than millions of years of nature,” says Cole.
In the films, the team wants everything to feel as realistic as possible, which means looking for inspiration from cool and quirky real-life organisms that could lend attributes to their creatures. Creating research-based designs is important to Cameron, an intrepid adventurer, and it’s not surprising that many of Pandora’s animals are influenced by marine life—Cameron has, after all, visited the ocean’s deepest point.
Creating the Medusoid
The Medusoid is a 500-foot bioluminescent jellyfish that produces hydrogen gas to float and has dangling tentacles to feed, similar to a Portuguese Man-of-War. Because its purpose in the film is to carry the gondolas of the Tlalim Clan—the Wind Traders—through the sky, the designers gave the Medusoid bow-tie-shaped sails so the clans people could steer it.
To control the Medusoid, the Tlalim attach rigging to veins on its sails. Knowing that the Na’vi—the peoples of Pandora—would think it too cruel to pierce an animal’s body, Cole incorporated natural thorn-like nodules into the sails to hook onto.
The Medusoid is towed by the marine-like wind ray. “We basically took the idea of a cuttlefish and gave it a gas-bag body,” says Cole. “It has that singular thin mantle around its body that moves in that sinusoidal [wave-like] motion.”
New ways to fly
Of all the creatures that could inspire the flying Medusoid, jellyfish might seem like an odd choice, as they drift on the current with little control over where they end up. Although birds are a more obvious inspiration for flight, many sea creatures fly in their own way, says Ristroph. Liquids and gases are both fluids, so they follow the same rules of physics. “Blurring swimming and flying allows you to look at a creature swimming and ask, ‘can that same strategy or a similar strategy be used for flying?’”
In water, you can lessen the effect of gravity by adjusting buoyancy, so getting something to “fly” underwater “really is a step towards flight in air,” Ristroph says.
As part of his own research, Ristroph created a flying machine that mimicked a jellyfish’s movement to generate lift—and it worked. “It has some stability properties, meaning the aircraft doesn't topple over so easily,” he says.
Researchers’ initial ideas are often reined in by what’s possible in the real-world. Scientific experiments are “heavily constrained by gravity, physics, and the math involved,” Ristroph says. “We have these nice guard rails.”
But Cole has his own guardrails to ensure viewers connect with the story. “We can't go too alien,” he says, “because you need to relate to it.” If the characters feel too “other,” people can’t buy into their lives, struggles, and successes, and the movie just doesn’t work.
As well as ensuring people enjoy the movie, Cole hopes that empathy for the mythical world of Pandora might have real-world impact. So much of Pandora is inspired by real ecosystems, creatures, and communities on our own planet, and the designers wish for their depictions to inspire a wonder for nature in general.
“By falling in love with Pandora, they are, in turn, falling in love with Earth,” he says, “and taking an interest in our world and the conservation of our environment.”
