‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ Uses Sound as a Breath of Fresh Air

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy . We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. For a production sound mixer working on a typical production, four months might encompass the length of the entire shoot. On “ Avatar: Fire and Ash ,” production sound mixer Julian Howarth spent four months finding the best way to record a single sound: the first breath of air taken by actors as they emerged from the surface after spending minutes underwater. “[Director] Jim [Cameron] said, ‘This is a really important part of the drama. It’s something we have to capture,'” Howarth told IndieWire, explaining that one of the key challenges of his job on both “Fire and Ash” and its predecessor, “Avatar: The Way of Water,” was figuring out how to capture performances being recorded in a 30-foot deep water tank. “Drama is not just what people say, it’s what’s felt, and it’s breath, and it’s emotion,” Howarth said. Part of the emotion in the underwater scenes came from the sense of relief the actors expressed when they came to the surface after holding their breath. “That first intake of air confirms that you’re alive after the trepidation of being underwater.” The problem with properly capturing that moment of release and relief was that the microphones built into the actors’ helmets didn’t work properly under the shooting conditions. “The pressure of the water at 30-foot depth collapsed the microphone diaphragm,” Howarth said. “By the time it reached the surface, it took two minutes for the air to equalize, similar to your eardrum when you go diving. So you didn’t really get a clear signal when they came to the surface.” To address the issue, Howarth collaborated with the design and engineering departments to redesign and rebuild the microphones. “We spent four months taking apart the microphones we had,” Howarth said. “We added additional diaphragms and layers of diaphragms to try and reduce the pressure on the microphone capsule at the end.” The end result was a microphone that could clearly get across the emotion in the breath that Cameron was looking for - just one of many instances on the “Avatar” films where Howarth had to work with departments outside of what one would typically think of as the purview of the production sound mixer. “You’re always overlapping, and you really gain a lot of respect for what everybody does,” Howarth said, noting that he collaborated particularly closely with the design and prop departments, as when they worked together to create a working oxygen mask for Spider (Jack Champion). “We built one that worked and provided oxygen,” Howarth said. “I had a comm system in it, so he could speak and we could record him untethered underwater. We spent six months researching and developing that to make sure it would work, and...

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