Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1544153
PROPERTYMASTERSGUILD.ORG 17 made. We kept it special by making sure it was only used by Varang. About the same time in the story, Quaritch's knife shifts from the RDA issue to a custom Ash knife with the same red crystal blade that Varang carries. Jake Sully's weapons blended his two worlds. He and his forces used captured Skel Trooper AR's and bullpups that weren't built with stocks. The inherent strength and advanced targeting of the Skel suit did not require the traditional shoulder stock. Jake, the ex-marine, would have found a solution. The Na'vi made carved stocks with intricately woven patterns tying them to the main body of the guns. Jake also lashed RPG warheads onto arrows for Neytiri to use. It's a human/Na'vi combination that mirrors her struggle with her hybrid family. Hunting, fighting, and defense is a big part of culture, but it is certainly not the whole picture. Music also defines culture. We had a dinner scene with dancing and revelry on the Wind Trader ship so, early in prep, we made sure to work closely with our composer, Simon Franglen. He had strong ideas as to how the music would sound, and we used these early discussions to design the instruments to match the tones and feel of the music he would eventually compose. Some of our stringed designs got quite large to accommodate the lower end he was looking for, and we leaned into wind instruments that could produce multiple tones at once. Regarding the food, we decided that a close-knit community onboard a relatively small airship would eat in a communal family style. We served our dishes on platters for small groups of 4-6 encouraging sharing from platter to platter amidst the dancing and celebrations of life. The reef people cooked whole vegetables and fish over open flame on spits and skewers, while Neytiri kept her Omatikaya cooking style of steaming chopped food in packets wrapped in wet leaves. Performing in a capture volume can be much like black box theater. Our actors performed in a gray volume with rough geometry for ground, with partial or nonexistent walls in the sets, and a helmet camera that was always in their face. Without going into a treatise on performance-capture methodologies and technology, I'll just say that the volume props required needed to have the correct geometry, weight, and action as the final rendered versions. Without this accuracy, the performance is compromised. It is because of this that Jim insisted that we keep everything as real as possible. That the props that our actors worked with were as real as we could make them, not just to aid the accuracy of the capture, but to give our sets and environments as much "reality" as we could. Jim wanted the sets to be populated with props to give the cast the ability to spontaneously interact with an environment which might otherwise be almost entirely virtual. The props we filled the Sully reef home with were all designed to give the actors the ability to find things and explore. The now empty war bow stand and JAKE SULLY'S WEAPON ADAPTATIONS