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.”
