We Spent 65 Days Recreating Avatar WITHOUT Any CGI. We Tried To Recreate AVATAR Without Any CGI. We (fIlmmakers Felipe and Michelle) jumped on our hardest cinematography challenge yet...we tried to film James Cameron's Avatar (the way of water) without any VFX, no CGI, nothing! Everything must be achieved through practical effects and in LIVE ACTION.
So we chose two different shots. The first one was a close up of Neytiri, so Michelle had to do Na'vi cosplay without any prior experience in special effects makeup. Then we built a set at home that was supposed to look like Pandora, and with a slider, we managed to pull something kind of decent (not really).
For the second shot, we chose one of the most famous images in this movie, when a Tulkun is holding Lo'ak (Jake Sully's son) hand underwater. This was incredibly hard to replicate because we had to use miniatures, and a giant fishtank to place our cameras underneath. Then, in post-production, we had to do a lot of color correction and we did add some live action water texture, because the ocean current was simple not there....in a fishtank.
