To get there we needed new water and facial animation techniques as well as more advanced virtual production workflows. These included a real-time in-camera depth compositing as well as underwater performance capture and a new performance-driven cable-cam eyeline system developed with Lightstorm Entertainment.
Family bliss is fractured when the 'sky people' return, including an avatar Na'vi version of one Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who has come to finish what he started, including vengeance on Jake for the death of his human form. He comes back with a group of former-human-now-Na'vi soldiers who are the film's main antagonists, but not the only ones. "Avatar: The Way of Water" once again casts the military, planet-destroying humans of this universe as its truest villains, but the villains' motives are sometimes a bit hazy. Around halfway through, I realized it's not very clear why Quaritch is so intent on hunting Jake and his family, other than the plot needs it, and Lang is good at playing mad.
Cameron stated in 2006 that if Avatar proved successful, he would like to develop sequels, and he announced the first two sequels in 2010, following the widespread success of the first film, with the first sequel slated for a 2014 release. However, the addition of two more sequels, bringing the total number of Avatar films to five, and the need to develop new technology in order to film performance capture scenes underwater, a feat never before accomplished, resulted in significant delays to allow the crew more time to work on the writing, preproduction, and visual effects.
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