Behind the scenes of AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER - interview with cinematographer Russell Carpenter ASC 

Russell is brilliant - I am a big fan of his work.

Добрый день, большое спасибо за такое интересное интервью. Эта информация будет очень полезной не только создателям компьютерной графики но и зрителям. У этого интервью незаслужено мало просмотров.

When we were starved of Avatar content I found a Russell Carpenter interview where he talked about working on the film "The Wizard of Speed and Time" from 1988, so I checked it out, it's on youtube, and it's brilliant! I think about Mauro Fiore, though, who must not have wanted to return to Avatar. Fiore won the Oscar for best cinematography, but I wonder how he felt about that since he only worked on the live action elements of Avatar 1. The fully CG sequences were a complicated mix of technicians who worked on the lighting and Cameron himself did all of the shots with a virtual camera --- surely the Oscar judges were rewarding those aspects of the filmmaking, aspects that had nothing to do with Fiore, which I don't think the academy understood. The editing took a tremendous amount of work that went unrecognized by the Academy --- Hurt Locker won in Best Editing over Avatar. Hurt Locker. And yes, there are some awkward cuts in the final film of Way of Water and it will no doubt lose to another film, but the work of editing on Avatar movies goes far beyond the final cut. Cameron and his editing team have invented a new way of film making by selecting and compiling the best performances --- they aren't working with shots at all until it comes to previz and post production, they have to compile all these disparate performances together to build the scenes that then get shot with the virtual camera or with the blended live action/computer generated images before being rendered out by Weta FX. The editors are doing incredibly difficult pioneering work, there's four of them, including James Cameron, on Way of Water, and they were there every day of performance capture. With Avatar everything has been redefined, the cinematographer is not simply the person who lights and shoots live action, the editor isn't simply one person who cuts together completed shots in post production, the actor isn't doing film acting even though they are making films. I hope this changes things in the film business. We see it in videogames, they used to take 8 months to make then sixteen and now normal production is about four years of development on AAA budgeted titles. Hollywood, on the other hand, is still focused on the same production timelines that have existed for a century but if quality is to increase and the industry is to evolve to tell stories never before possible then it has to start adopting the game production mentality as Cameron and team have done.

My favourite episode in a while. Loved it. Thank you.

He did the cinematography for the 2004 film Noel! I love that movie. Nobody knows about it, but it's great.

They chose a 270-degree shutter angle for this movie to avoid the same problem as The Hobbit, but I remember reading that The Hobbit also used a 270-degree shutter angle.

Can the Sony Venice sensor blocks go wireless? Or do you always have to have someone wrangle cable with camera bodies strapped to their back?

The Lion King had 1 real shot, so it is not a 100% virtual movie. Also, it is an awful movie. The Way Of Water is really a great movie, in 48fps/24fps/3D/2D.