Case Study: Avatar

“The suspension of disbelief is an unspoken contract that has served the needs of moviegoers and moviemakers for over one hundred years.”

For this case study I will be looking into the work of James Cameron’s Avatar. Above you can see a mood board that I have created from works of various artists in The Art of Avatar book. There are many reasons why I choose this film as my first case study, mostly because there are a lot of things I like and don’t like about the film and designs that I want to discuss and incorporate into my project. I’ll start off with everything that I do admire with the film and that is the variety of creatures and environment sketches that show how the creatures tie into their world. The occurring theme of bright blues and purples within the environment shows a unity with each element of this world, everything seems very much at home on the planet of Pandora. The book also shows how the development of each creature and machine with sketches, 3D models and the final finished piece; as well as notes on what certain parts of the creatures had a specific function.   

“First, achieve a creative and distinct look, and second, ensure that the creature is also plausible.”

One of the creatures that I really admire in terms of design is the Banshee. As you can see on the left this flying creature has impressive form language and interesting jaw function. The colour theory for this creature is also visually appealing to me and for this project I hope to create high quality creatures such as this. The Banshee has had many more hours put into the design than the others, which probably explains its impressive design and performance. I would also like to take great care when creating my designs in a professional and efficient timeframe, so to have a great creative design as well as having a creature that is entirely plausible.

One of the creatures that I wasn’t impressed with was the DireHorse. The team wanted to create a creature that was ride-able for the native Na’vi which obviously lead them to focus on horses, namely the Clydesdales. I think they went too far with taking aspects of the horse into their design as for one, horses do not live in the jungle, they have evolved to survive in open grass lands, they are too big and not agile enough to escape predators within such tight and compact environments such as a jungle.  

I’ve worked and trained horses for many years and sometimes they have difficulty with four legs, you really do have to train them to manage with four or else they’ll be tripping constantly. So to have a creature with six legs (two sets incredibly close to each other) that creature is going to have great difficulty moving.

Other creatures within the film which are clearly based on animals such as dogs and big cats, they are very adaptable with their body, a dog can still easily move around with three legs and could probably cope with six. An animal such as a horse which is big, strong and solid with their body, is not very adaptable. Which is why in most cases where a horse damages their leg beyond repair it gets put down because they need those four legs and cannot cope to support its weight with only three.    

In a small behind the scenes video of Avatar on the DireHorse (link at the end of this post), they showed clips of them trying to create the movements for the direhorse and as you can see it just doesn’t look right and the front legs keep outstretching too much it looks like it breaks every time. I feel like because of time restraints they had to create this creature, as it was taking far too long and they needed to have a finished workable concept. 

“It had been the town bike of creature design, everyone had a crack at it.”

         - Neville Page on the direhorse  

I decided to create some sketches on what could possibly improve the design. As you can see I moved the front set of legs forward and turned them into claw like hands, manly for helping with foraging, digging up roots and removing vines within the jungle etc. They could also be used as a defense weapon with their sharp hoof like nails could cut deep into flesh. They could also curl into a hoof shape for extra support for when trying to reach up trees or stretching down to drink from a river. Doing this one simple change helped make this creature survive better within a jungle environment as well as solving the movement issues and keeping the six legs.

Overall, I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from this case study and I have a few questions that I want to follow up on during my research of the film industry, such as questions on pipelines, concepts and design. I have one more case study on how creature design affects the viewer and why that is important.

Below are links to short 1min videos on specific creatures in Avatar. 

DireHorse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4plftv4aCSc

Banshee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoHZcf_lkMA

Thanator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhxcx5n3gjQ

Images from this blog post I have scanned myself from the referenced book below:

Fitzpatrick L. Preface by Jackson P. Foreword by Landau J and Epilogue by Cameron J. 2009. The Art of Avatar. New York. Abrams.