VFX supervisors Jabbar Raisani and Marion Spates, working with Company 3’s Siggy Ferstl, developed an innovative workflow where many shots normally sent to a visual effects studio were handled by the colorist, making use of the extensive toolset within Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve.
‘Avatar: The Last Airbender,’ now streaming on Netflix. Image © 2024 Netflix, Inc.
Netflix's popular new series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, presented a new take on the beloved animated series, combining and adapting fantastical elements of that show into live-action. Created by Albert Kim, the show follows a young boy, Aang (Gordon Cormier), on a quest, along with companions Katara (Kiawentiio) and Sokka (Ian Ousley), through a spectacular world of magic and monsters to bring peace to a war-torn world.
The show, nominated for an Outstanding Special Visual Effects Emmy just this week, premiered as the streamer's most-viewed series and was almost immediately renewed for a second season. Capturing the look and feel of the show was a major challenge for all involved, and significantly for VFX Supervisors Jabbar Raisani (also an executive producer of the series and director of two episodes), who, along with VFX Supervisor Marion Spates, oversaw the creation of thousands of effects shots spread out over multiple companies.
Raisani , who had worked with Senior Colorist Siggy Ferstl of Company 3 previously on all 28 episodes of Netflix’s VFX-rich Lost in Space, had developed an unusual work method in which many effects that would traditionally go to a VFX company were handled by the colorist within the color grading process -- a workflow that made extensive use of the ever-growing toolset within Ferstl's color corrector of choice, Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve -- and leveraged Ferstl's dedication to exploring the technical and creative aspects of what colorists can contribute to a show's visuals far beyond what is traditionally thought of as "color grading."
Wherever this was a viable option, Raisani was delighted to go this route since it meant those shots could evolve much more quickly. Rather than pulling material, sending it out, waiting for the work to be returned and repeating the process each time supervisors had notes, he could work with Ferstl iterating the shots in real-time and see the work take shape in exactly the same way the process of color grading works.
"We had a pretty well-established relationship of where visual effects would end, and color would begin," Raisani says. Having been briefed on many aspects of the series' look, the colorist started working within Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve tools, including OpenFX and Fusion, to come up with methods to achieve what would be asked of him
Additionally, Raisani notes that while VFX companies generally provide rotoscope-style holdback mattes to colorists to allow for the artist to finetune difficult-to-isolate portions of effects shots, Ferstl worked entirely without mattes, using combinations of tools within Resolve such as Magic Mask Relight Depth Map to separate out whatever elements needed work.
Below is just a sampling of some of the work the two supervisors chose to have Ferstl handle within the color grading process.
The Spirit World
The Avatar of the story is responsible for maintaining harmony among the world's four nations and serves as the link between the physical world and the spirit world. The Spirit World, which was a key element of the animated show, plays just as much of a role in Aang's story in the live-action show.
Scenes set in this ethereal place were shot primarily on soundstages in a fairly straightforward manner against realistic green-color flora. The space as we see it in the show is one of lavender flora and unearthly skies. While colorists traditionally isolate and manipulate colors, Ferstl explains, "Just keying all the greens and making them lavender color, would have made everything look very one dimensional." Influenced by the unique look of color infrared photography, Ferstl pitched the idea of creating a similar look here, which Raisani and Spates responded to enthusiastically.
"Rather than just adding a wash of lavender," he says, "we also created an effect that made the greens progressively less saturated as they got brighter and then that effect played a role when we pushed the green into lavender." Since the stack of effects was all built in Resolve, Raisani says, they had the ability to affect contrast or reduce saturation within the overall setup and iterate the multivarious aspects of the space and provide immediate feedback.
In order to make this new environmental color feel more real, less like something imposed in post, Ferstl explains, "I used the Color Compressor, which is one of my favorite tools. It simplifies the palette in a way that helps keep the edges of the foliage from feeling too pronounced. One of the tricks when you're combining all these tools is how you layer it, what in the order you do everything."
"Siggy was able to just come up with these different looks that worked so well," says Spates, "with his roto tools and his A.I. tools [in Resolve]. It was pretty amazing how we were able to make it what it is so quickly."
The Dragon
The Dragon is the original practitioner of firebending and can breathe fire. Much of this character was built out in CG by specialists in developing and animating creatures, but important elements in these Dragon shots were also Ferstl's work. He estimates about 30% of the overall was done on his watch.
Here entire backgrounds had to be isolated, using quite lot of masking and roto work and using Resolve’s Fast Noise plug-in in its OpenFX tab to create various kinds of heat and haze effects. Ferstl also used tools within Resolve's Color Page to analyze the flicker of the VFX flames to create a flicker in the foreground of the shot to match and thereby enhance the sense of interactivity between the flames and the rest of the scene. He also utilized the Fast Noise plug-in to create reflections of the VFX-vendor-created flames in the in aspects of the architecture and blend the various elements together.
Camera Shakes
Spates oversaw the creation of many "camera shakes" and the attendant distortion that would take place as fire passes by the viewer's field of view during firefights. Spates worked with Ferstl's Finishing Editor Mike DeLegal to accomplish the shaking inside of Resolve's Fusion tab. (Ferstl and DeLegal would share the same projects from their own control panels in different physical locations but since they were on the same Company 3 network, Raisani, Spates and other stakeholders could instantly check in on what was going on with either Ferstl or DeLegal).
"I was told," Spates explains, "that if you do the shaking in the color process, then you can change it easily. But if you do it in visual effects and then try to change something, it can break all the beauty work. It can break everything. Since we had previously done a lot of shakes for Lost in Space, we were very comfortable working on them with Mike."
"Everybody really liked that we could hand finesse the effects shot-by-shot and then make any adjustments they requested almost in real-time," DeLegal recalls.
The Dying of the Moon
One of the most anticipated live-action moments in the series -- the Siege of the North in Season 1's finale -- involved the death of the moon caused by a villainous character who kills the Moon Spirit's physical form. Rendered beautifully in the animated series, when the Moon dies, the color is sucked from the world.
Raisani started to move the sequence's shots through a traditional VFX path, saying "we thought we'd do a full color final and then let VFX take it to the desaturated look. But the deeper we got into the sequence, we started thinking we'd be in trouble if we ended up going down this path because it was so complicated and there were so many creative decisions involved for each shot, we knew it wasn't a 'plug and play' solution. So, we asked Siggy to get in there shot by shot and creatively figure out how to get this effect of color draining out of everything."
God Rays
Quite a lot of "lighting" effects were deliberately left for post, since the actual shooting was already so complex and the show's creators wanted to leave control to finetune as the show was taking shape with all its effects, which wouldn't have been possible with these things baked in.
Many light rays were generated and composited traditionally, but a significant amount of that work was completed by Ferstl, who combined more traditional color tools with some of the most sophisticated new tools within Resolve's OpenFX tab. These allowed the colorist to isolate, shape and finetune every "lighting" element in each frame to help sell the effect and push the shots over the finish line to where the filmmakers could realize the unique look of the series.
Specifically, the "God Rays" had the effect of poking through the atmosphere. Ferstl used a number of tools that mimicked a hazy, smoky interior and then other combinations of tools to finetune the rays. "Our excellent vendors could certainly have done the God Rays," says Raisani. “That wasn't an issue. But we were like, 'don't do the God Rays! We're going to do it in color because we finetune every part of them in real-time. We can have control over exactly how much atmosphere there is, how much light and what angle the light should come in at."
Other Enhancements
Ferstl also made use of various recipes he developed by combining many Resolve toolsets to create "lens distortion" around the edges of some frames along with anamorphic lens style flares that would be cued whenever a light source is visible in the frame.
Even before cuts started coming into Ferstl's bay, he started combining multiple effects within the OpenFX tab to create a series of camera "filters" that would allow for the addition of diffusion after the fact. To help communicate the exact effects these "filters" would have on the images, he even created internal names that likened different effects to specific names of traditional glass filters that every cinematographer would recognize, even emulating the various strengths those optical filters come in.
"We really look at Siggy as our final compositor," says Raisani, who estimates the colorist touched over 1,100 shots in the first season. "There were many things that could be shot in a specific way because we knew we'd be finishing the look with him.
"Between Marion and me," he sums up, "looking at 250 visual effects shots a day, that's a lot of hours! It was a hard volume to push through any pipeline, not just for Marion and myself, but for all our support team that would deliver all notes to vendors, all the new revs that vendors would have to do. To be able to take so many shots out of that VFX pipeline and complete them in color, cut down a huge percentage of work and that just saves us time and money and enable us to have more control over the look."
