Avatar 2 Production Designers Shared a Short Breakdown of the Movie's Vehicles

Avatar: The Way of Water hit the big screens in December and many already had a chance to see what James Cameron prepared for us in this new chapter which he was working on for almost 13 years. While the artistic component of the movie can be a reason for discussions, probably, no one can deny the impressiveness of the technical component of the new film.

Apart from the new wonderful water ecosystem with its beautiful creatures and stunning landscapes that Cameron revealed in The Way of Water, the creators also paid a lot of attention to the human military and the tools its uses to avenge Na'vi and Jake Sully in particular.

In a recent interview with Variety, the movie's production designers Ben Procter and Dylan Cole shared a short breakdown of how they worked on vehicles appearing in The Way of Water.

For instance, Procter and Cole revealed how the S-76 SeaDragon, a large Wing-In-Ground-Effect ship designed for hunting the whale-like creatures, tulkun, where a number of action pieces of the movie take place, was created. According to the production designers, a lot of inspiration for the massive mothership was taken from the Lun-class ekranoplan, a ground-effect vehicle used by the Soviet Navy in the late 1980s.

As Procter and Cole explained, the SeaDragon combines the Lun-class ekranoplan elements with a hydrofoil effect which means that the ship is capable of lifting above the water as the vehicle gains speed. The production designers also shared that the work on the SeaGragon started with developing the engineering of the ship and only after it the team moved to add more fantastical elements to the vehicle's design.

In addition, they revealed that the launch and recovery processes of all the diving vehicles in the movie originated from real-world analogs which were enhanced for "cinematic speed requirements" and the final designs of the vehicles were massively inspired by marine animals. 

Procter and Cole also spoke about the SMP-2 Crab Suit, a human-driven multifunction submersible that, among others, assists hunting boats in the recovery of tulkun catches. 

"With many of our vehicles, what we built were cockpits. We effectively built the cockpit itself, including the finished exterior, and then we build a piece of body and one leg," Procter said. "There are so many digital visual effects work that go on top. You have to be really crafty with what you build…Without the body and the leg, it’s placed on the motion base for when we want to shoot a pilot doing stuff while the crab suit is active."

The production designers also discussed the creation of the train that was destroyed by Na'vi at the beginning of the movie, the reworked exoskeletons, and the general approach to designing the world of Avatar. You can learn more about this by reading the full interview here.