‘AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER’

Production design by Dylan Cole (“Tron: Legacy”) and Ben Procter (“Ender’s Game”)

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Time frame:

Hero home: Metkayina Reef Village

To demonstrate how the Na’vi race integrates with the environment, filmmakers suspended the village from the roots of monumental mangrove-like trees. Designer Cole says, “We explored a mix of tensile membrane architecture for their communal spaces, walkways and tarps. For their homes, we used woven wasp nest-like structures. Weta Workshop constructed a 14-foot-tall version of the Sully home from bent cane, woven flax and other natural materials. This was 3-D scanned and photographed by Weta Digital so all that reality could be used in their final VFX shots.”

Inspiration: Polynesia, Malaysia, Indonesia among others.

Workplace: Bridgehead

Reminiscent of a frontier boom town, the human-built industrial port refines fossil fuels at a relentless pace. “Jim [Cameron] wanted it to feel like ants, toiling and building,” designer Procter says.

Inspiration: Spacecraft, mega cranes, work ships, oil rigs and refineries served as contemporary reference points. “This engineered world of design is based on function rather than style and therefore evolves slowly,” Procter notes. “Rather than explicitly aiming for futurism, I guess you could say we looked for tomorrow in the periphery of today.”