Inside Avatar: The Way of Water’s incredible process for matching Spider to the Na’vi

polygon.com:

To the surprise of no one: Avatar: The Way of Water, James Cameron’s original 2009 film, picked up the 2023 Oscar for visual effects. That’s because the VFX department’s work touched on every aspect of the film — even the human performances. In the lead up to the movie’s upcoming digital home release, 20th Century Studios has shared an exclusive clip with Polygon from a behind-the-scenes featurette dedicated to the character of Spider and the motion-capture technology used to bring him into the action.

Spider, a new character introduced in Avatar: The Way of Water played by Jack Champion (Scream VI), is the adopted human son of series’ protagonists Jake Sully and Neytiri. Naturally, the process of filming human-scale characters opposite of the film’s comparatively giant Na’vi characters presented significant creative and technical challenges for Cameron and his team.

While Champion had to replicate his entire performance for Avatar: The Way of Water twice during the film’s production, this new clip reveals that certain scenes required the crew to film scenes not only twice, but also at different scales at the same time.

“When we did capture on the first movie, we were capturing everybody at the same scale; It was one-to-one,” Jon Landau, a long-time collaborator of James Cameron’s and the producer for Avatar: The Way of Water, says during the clip. “Here, we had so many scenes with humans and Na’vi characters, that we [needed] multiple scales to capture a scene.”

Landau elaborates by explaining that, in order to film scenes where multiple Na’vi and human characters are on-screen simultaneously, they would have to build two separate motion capture sets and film mocap doubles opposite of one another before converting that