Editing 'Avatar': Behind the Scenes of the Five-Year Process and Four Editors to Cut 'The Waterway' Twice

The credits for "Avatar: The Way of the Water" list four editors: Stephen Rivkin, David Brenner, John Refoua, and director James Cameron (who, along with Alfonso Cuarón, is one of only two directors to have won an Academy Award for Best Editing). According to Cameron, this only indicates the enormous amount of work involved in putting together his epic adventure. “We had four editors who worked for five years, two other editors who were there for a year or two, and then a team of about a dozen assistants split between Los Angeles and New Zealand,” said Cameron at IndieWire. . "It's very editing intensive, and the reason for that is that you basically edit the whole movie twice."

Rivkin, who previously collaborated with Cameron on the first 'Avatar' as well as the Cameron-produced 'Alita: Battle Angel', was on 'Way of Water' for a total of seven years due to his role in pre-production, when he worked with the art department to put together demo reels for the studio. While some of his time was spent working on material for future "Avatar" movies, most of those seven years were spent on "Way of Water," which placed incredible demands on the editing team considering the performance capture techniques Cameron used to record his actors' performances as reference material for the CGI characters that would eventually populate the film.

"Our first task when the scenes are shot is to go through the dailies with Jim, find out what interests him, and create what we call a performance edit," Rivkin told IndieWire. “It would be the actors in the volume, which is pretty much a blank stage. They're basically acting in a black box, so we're looking at the pure performances of these actors and their relationships to each other. At this point in the process, Cameron and his editors weren't choosing the shots or angles, but only the performance takes for Cameron to use later in the process when he created his compositions using a camera. virtual, a process that allowed much greater flexibility than traditional cinema.

"Avatar: The Waterway"

Disney/20th Century Studios

"We don't have to be limited," Rivkin said. “We can combine takes – an actor could be take one and an actor could be take three if that's where their best performance is. Sometimes we even stitched together performances of the same actor on different takes. These performances were used to create what Cameron called "charges" to serve as material for the director's virtual camera process. "It takes months to create the scene files," Cameron said. "Then the cast are all off to other shows or on vacation, and I'm using my virtual camera to start filming the cover from these scene files that the editors have put together."

“We create these files that can be shot later to create the best moments for the actor,” Rivkin added. "One of the amazing things is that any shot can then become a wide shot, a medium shot, a close up shot, a tracking shot, a crane." After about 18 months of performance recording, with the actors...