Avatar became the highest grossing movie of all time when it came out in 2009 and one of the major reasons for it was due to their advancement in technology even more than a decade ago, and this was possible due to director James Cameron’s commitment. Avatar is still one of the most beautiful movies ever made.
Avatar: The Way Of Water has already surpassed its predecessor in every possible way except for of course box office collections. The sequel has surpassed the original even in the image quality, which was perhaps the biggest factor to the film’s success. Not just that, the sequel has a better story, stronger characters and more.
Cameron’s Avatar: The Way Of Water uses High Frame Rate Technology also know as HRF which is the reason for such a beauty in the image quality. Basically what Cameron did with this technology is shoot the film at a higher frame rate to make the scenes look more smoother.
Every time we watch a movie, we see 24 images in a single second. That’s the minimum amount of images or frames that needs to been shown in order to create the illusion of fluid movement. This convention has been used to make movies for over a century now. Cameron shot the movie at a higher frame rate (at 48 frames per second) with the help of HFR technology.
While shooting the film at a higher frame rate did help its image quality immensely, fans argued that some of the scenes felt like videogame cutscenes. The reason for this is videogames generally use 60 frames per second for actions. For some games, the frame rate go as high as 120 frames per second to make the players perform actions smoothly.
Since Avatar: The Way of Water is a fully digital movie, it was not much different than a game development, where Cameron made actors play scenes in mo-cap suits, recreated the scenes in a computer and added voiceovers. This makes some scenes in the movie look like scenes from a game, which is not exactly a bad thing in heavy action movies like Avatar.
This is only the second installment of the 5 Avatar movies that Cameron has planned to make, with the 3rd sequel coming in December 2024, followed by the 4th & 5th installments coming in 2026 & 2028 respectively, and it has been such a huge success so far. The future of this iconic series is surely going to be a wild ride for every Avatar fan.