Method Studios collaborated with Netflix on the recently released live-action adaptation of the series, Avatar: The Last Airbender. The series, developed by Albert Kim, follows the adventures of a young Airbender named Aang, and his friends, as they fight to end the Fire Nation’s war and bring balance to the world. Director and executive producer Jabbar Raisani approached Method Studios to create visually striking title cards for each episode — titles that not only nodded to the original animated series, but also lived up to the visuals of the new adaptation.
The team at Method Studios, led by creative director Wes Ebelhar, concepted and pitched several different directions for the title before deciding to move forward with one called Martial Arts.
“We loved the idea of abstracting the movements and ‘bending’ forms of the characters through three-dimensional brushstrokes,” says Ebelhar. “We also wanted to create separate animations to really highlight the differences between the elements of air, earth, fire and water. For example, with ‘Air,’ we created this swirling vortex, while ‘Earth’ was very angular and rigid. The 3D brushstrokes were also a perfect way to incorporate the different elemental glyphs from the opening of the original series.”
Giving life to the different elemental brushstrokes was no easy task, “We created a custom procedural setup in Houdini to generate the brushstrokes, which was vital for giving us the detail and level of control we needed. Once we had that system built, we were able to pipe in our original previz , and they matched the timing and layouts perfectly. The animations were then rendered with Redshift and brought into After Effects for compositing. The compositing ended up being a huge task as well,” explains Ebelhar. “It wasn’t enough to just have different brush animations for each element, we wanted the whole environment to feel unique for each — the Fire title should feel like its hanging above a raging bonfire, while Water should feel submerged with caustics playing across its surface.”
Ebelhar says many people were involved in bringing these titles to life and gives “a special shout out to Johnny Likens, David Derwin, Max Strizich, Alejandro Robledo Mejia, Michael Decaprio and our producer Claire Dorwart.”
“With 3D asset creation becoming widely adopted, performance is paramount for the future of DCC apps,” says Greg Brown, product manager at Foundry. “Modo 17.0 sets a foundation for increased performance now plus further enhancements well into Modo’s future. Additionally, bundling the Prime version of the OctaneRender from Otoy with Modo 17.0 will speed up the entire experience, from modeling to final render, reducing performance barriers for artists.”
Foundry has enhanced several capabilities of Modo’s powerful modeling tools, including:
And one of the great things about the point where we took over is that Episode 5 is its own little capsule episode. We tried to shoot some of the stuff on the base in a similar tone to how they were shooting it. But then, once we got to that monster mission, it became its own thing, and we shot it in our own way. Then, with Episode 6, we were in completely different spaces. It’s a real break from the previous episodes because it’s the midpoint of the season, we’re away from the base, and there’s a big shift in terms of where the story is going. That gave us a little bit of freedom to very consciously shift how we were going to approach the visual language with Jac. It was an organic way to make that change without it feeling like a weird break in the season.
On Captain Marvel, so often actors are just responding to tennis balls and an AD running around the set for eyelines. In this case, it was nice for the actors to see an actual airplane on fire outside their window for their performances to feel fresh.
Boden: I think that we had a lot of the same reference points when we first started talking, like The Cold Blue, an amazing documentary with a lot of footage that was taken up in the planes during World War II. Filmmakers actually were shooting up there with the young men who were on missions in these bomber planes. That was a really important reference point for us in terms of determining where the cameras can be mounted inside one of these planes. We tried as much as possible to keep those very real camera positions on the missions so that it felt as reality-based and as visceral as possible and not like a Marvel movie. We used some of the color palette from that documentary as well.
Was it a really tough shoot?
Typically, on our films, we’re involved in all the other post departments, visual effects and sound, every step of the way. But on this series, we were less involved, although we gave notes. Then Jac did all the grading and the rest of the show. She kind of took over and was very involved. She’ll have a lot of insights into the whole DI process. (See Sidebar)
What were the big editing challenges for both episodes? Just walk us through it a bit. 
How hands on were Spielberg and Hanks, or did they let you do your own thing? 
Boden: Some days we’d show up and suddenly find out an hour into the day that we weren’t going to get an actor that we were planning to shoot with, so we’d have to rearrange the day and try to shoot without that actor. That was a big challenge.
The screen look for the close-ups was built using close-up imagery of LED screens, with different amounts of down-rez and re-up-rez to get the right amount of grid look for different screens and levels of zoom. Artists also added aberration, focus falloff, etc.
Are you very involved in that? 
These ecosystems are draining resources by adding complication and subtracting budget, and they are ultimately just as damaging as paying egress fees. The M&E field is small but produces incredible amounts of data. The status quo cloud business model involving egress fees is holding our industry back from taking full advantage of the cloud and unlocking new innovations.
The average file size from shooting a single take of a scene is several gigabytes, meaning that even one day of shooting creates a huge price tag anytime footage gets moved in and out of the cloud for multiple rounds of digital effects and editing. It makes planning expenses in advance extremely difficult, as filmmakers can’t know how much it will cost until they’ve uploaded their work to the cloud and started editing. With this virtual roadblock in place, it’s not surprising that many M&E companies feel that it’s unfeasible to embrace the cloud.
Finally, those digital assets on hard drives aren’t necessarily safe. The danger of transporting on-premise (hard drive-stored) work means drives can be lost, held up by a foreign country’s customs department or even stolen if the production is high-profile enough. This adds even more cost for security and transportation experts to protect files against each of these threats.
Migration opens with a birder watcher raising binoculars to his eyes. “Beautiful, isn’t it,” he says softly as an orchestral score from music studio Walker rises in the background and we hear the far-off cawing of the flying gridsters. “Each year they must follow the path of migration, but never fear, they’ll be back,” he says as we see the players swooping in to grab a fish from a lake or alighting gently just outside a cabin.
This Super Bowl, M&M’S, BBDO NY and design studio Unsaid Studio have teamed on a spot that celebrates the losers. The brand is consoling — or even trolling — them with the “Almost Champions Ring of Comfort,” which is studded with diamonds made from M&M’S peanut butter. Its sides feature a three-leaf clover and “2>1,” while a glittering M&M proudly flashing two fingers for second place rests in a bed of rubies on the top. Inside, wearers can find a single peanut butter M&M, sat in a mini stadium bezel.
The producers called on Chicago’s 
Working with designers and animators, including Ariel Costa, Matthew Nowak, Jens Mebes, Dan Moore, João Vaz Oliveira, Mollie Davis, and Andrei Popa, the Sarofsky team also developed a second visual theme: using hands and shadows in their storytelling. “Hands play an essential role in the series as Maya’s means of communicating using ASL – and in the telling of the creation story of the Choctaw Nation, which is told using shadow puppets in the series,” says Draht. “Developing these visual motifs amplified the core story and characters while allowing us to add meaning and tone. We use shadows to express history, danger and Maya’s ancestral connections.”
Did you do a lot of research?
What were the main challenges of shooting this? 
We adjusted stuff in the DI, but it wasn’t a big departure from the dailies. We matched all the shots for continuity. The way we work is that Yvan does his pass first to match it all, and then if I want the scene to be darker, there’s an offset for everything since it already matches. That makes the DI work pretty simple. It also gives us time to do a window here, a window there.
For its part, Zoic used a broad spectrum of software and tools but mainly relied on SideFX Houdini, Autodesk Maya and Foundry Nuke to achieve the majority of the VFX lift.
When it came to sound design, “The call was for futuristic sci-fi characters in an Old West environment,” says Dusty Albertz of Howdy Sound. “I think we succeeded in crafting a soundscape that is both believable and fun.”
The series opens in a dark cave located inside the Earth where we see Chafa, the first Choctaw, covered with clay, emerge from a glowing, swirling pool of magical blue water. Chafa exits the pools and drinks the water. As she stares down at her hands, tattoos glow and swirl onto her hand, and more clay people begin to appear. A bishinik bird then lands in her palm before flying away as an earthquake begins and the cave starts to collapse.
Clay Transformations
