UsaToday has recently written an article on the creation of the elements and the effects used to make them look somewhat, "realistic".

"My goal as a director, whether it's in dealing with actors or the score, is to control the tone of the film," says Shyamalan. "The CG (computer graphics) tone had to be right. There were times when I felt the water was moving too fast. Or that the weight of the water the character was throwing was just unrealistic."

Shyamalan says earth and air effects came together fairly quickly, the former being perhaps the easiest to duplicate, while the latter was often represented by whatever dust was kicked up as characters harnessed the wind.

Fire, too, came on board easily. ILM staffers used images of giant fan-driven plumes of fire as one key to the puzzle. Helping was the fact that the eye welcomes faked fire; real fire, when shot on film, actually looks thin and wrong.

But it was the water effects — which make up most of the film's spectacle — that took the most work and needed to be flawless, given Shyamalan's penchant for "really slowing the action down," says Helman. "With him, there's no blurring through scenes."

The technology to render such effects isn't new. But the speed with which they now can be turned around is in fact revolutionary, says Jody Duncan, editor of the special-effects industry magazine Cinefex.

"You could have done this film five years ago, but it might have taken you a month to render each frame," she says. "Now it's all about money and computing power. With both, you can create things that don't take people out of the story."

Avatar re-wrote the effects rulebook when it comes to directors being able to see what their movies will (roughly) look like as they are being shot. Similarly, ILM staffers were able to quickly render an effects-heavy Airbender scene, show it to Shyamalan and then tweak as needed.

"That was really exciting, because typically you're so lost in the effects," says Helman. "With Night, he would stop and tell us what a scene was about. That meant that both the director and the effects people could be sure they were telling the same tale."

Read the full article here