‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ visual effects supervisors Jabbar Raisani and Marion Spates on the challenge of bending elements for Netflix drama [Exclusive Video Interview]

“Avatar: The Last Airbender” visual effects supervisors Jabbar Raisani and Marion Spates have worked together on multiple Emmy-nominated projects – including “Lost in Space” and “Stranger Things.” Separately, their resumes include “WandaVision,” “Game of Thrones” and other massive spectacles and blockbusters. 

“There’s a shorthand certainly, where we can be like, ‘Hey, remember on Stranger Things when we did that shot with Vecna? Let’s do that,’” Raisani, a two-time Emmy winner for “Game of Thrones,” tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview. “But the other thing is just trust, right? We trust each other to really move it in the right direction. And we don’t have to worry about a ton of oversight to make sure it’s the right choice. It’s like, ‘Hey, show it to me when you think it’s in a good spot for me to review.’ And that might be two weeks, and it might be so far along that we can’t dramatically change it. But that goes along with having trust in each other and as artists.”

For the Netflix adaptation of “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” their trust in each other was paramount. The show is an adaptation of the beloved anime series that ran for three seasons from 2005 to 2008 on Nickelodeon, and it required a level of detail that necessitated numerous revisits to the original show. 

“We tried to be as inspired as we could by the animated series,” Raisani says. “The design for Appa, for example [the giant flying bison-like creature that the show’s hero rides] – when you look through the entire animated series, Appa is drawn differently in different frames. And so we have to take all those different versions of Appa and come up with one version that looks and feels like Appa. That was super challenging…. But it was just a back and forth of really trying to find that thing you imagined in your head for Appa that was based on all the animated references.”

Appa – like so many other creatures and elements of the show – was created digitally. So too were the show’s core airbending skills. In the series – set in an alternate world where citizens are split into four factions that correspond to the four elements of air, earth, water, and fire – those who can control their home element are considered benders. The Avatar is capable of using all four elements, and the Last Airbender of the title is Aang, a young boy who was frozen for a hundred years and is the last of his kind.

“We tried to have the actors informed on what the water or element that they’re bending is doing. Because I think it just helps them know what to do, where to look, and how to move based on what their element is doing,” Raisani, who is also an executive producer and director on the series, says. “Our stunt team did an awesome job of really preparing them for movement and doing movement training. So they really understood how to move their various forms. And that, in tandem with understanding in visual effects terms what the bending was going to do, I think allowed them to really see what was there without ever being able to see it until post.”

But while Raisani and Spates are a great team, they disagree on which element was the most difficult to render.

“The problem with bending is it can start to look a little animated, or I’ll call it campy, right?” Spates says. “Because it doesn’t really obey real physics, right? So airbending, to me, was one of the most challenging ones because airbending is something that you don’t see. How do you depict what airbending is? In the cartoon, you will find that they just give it a cool color. And sometimes it’s hard to tell if that’s dirt that came up from the cartoon anime or was the airbending. So we really tried to add physical elements. So we leaned into the F-22 and F-22 heat distortion.”

“I actually disagree on what’s the hardest,” says Raisani. “I think water is the hardest. With water, it’s really hard to find reference to water doing the things we need to do because water wants to obey gravity. So we found some zero-G references, and we did some slow-motion tests. And it was really through those we were like, ‘Okay, now I understand how we can at least approach waterbending and hit the story requirements we have to hit.’”

Netflix renewed “Avatar: The Last Airbender” for two additional seasons and Raisani, alongside Christine Boylan, has been elevated to lead the show going forward. It’s a responsibility he doesn’t take lightly.

“We’re still closely looking at the animated series and being inspired by that. And so I think there will be some big moments that fans will be familiar with,” he says about Season 2 and beyond. “But there’ll be new and fresh stuff that’s just as big as Season 1. We certainly want to keep the scope and the scale and the realism. We just want to do all the same, but but even better. We know how to make the show at this point. So we want to make it again, but do an even better job and have the fans love it all over again.”

“Avatar: The Last Airbender” streams on Netflix.

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