The fictional Pandoran biosphere, from James Cameron's Avatar, teems with a biodiversity of bioluminescent species ranging from hexapodal animals to other types of exotic fauna and flora. The Pandoran ecology forms a vast neural network spanning the entire lunar surface into which the Na'vi and other creatures can connect. The strength of this collective consciousness is illustrated when the human invaders are defeated in battle by the Pandoran ecology, after the Na'vi were nearly defeated. Cameron utilized a team of expert advisors in order to make the various examples of fauna and flora as scientifically feasible as possible.

Na'vi

Appearance
In Avatar, the Na'vi are an indigenous species that live on Pandora. They are humanoid in appearance and are  tall, having pairs of eyes, ears, arms, legs and feet like humans, as well as a nose, a mouth, and expressions recognizable to humans. The Na'vi differ from humans in having blue striped skin, pointed and mobile ears, large eyes, catlike noses and tails, and hands each with three fingers and a thumb (hybrid avatars, on the other hand, retain the five-fingered hands of their human DNA). While taller than humans, they have narrower proportions in body frame. Their bones are reinforced with naturally occurring carbon fiber. The Na'vi also have a distinctive tendril feature protruding from the back of their heads, surrounded by hair (resembling a long plait or queue), feeding directly into the brain. This organ allows them to connect with other organisms around them, transferring electrochemical signals such as thoughts and memories to the trees, plants, and other creatures. In the original script, Cameron refers to these as "Jubilees", although the word is not used in the film and may be changed by the time the novel is published. The Na'vi were initially conceived to be more alien in appearance. Cameron recalled that when one of the main characters, Neytiri, was originally drawn, she had gills and other protuberances. In addition to feline features, the species was redesigned to seem more human so that audiences could better relate to it.

According to Cameron, the appearance of the Na'vi character Neytiri had some specific inspirations and requirements: she was inspired by Raquel Welch's character in Fantastic Voyage and by Vampirella, noting in the latter's case, "the fact [Vampirella] didn't exist didn't bother me because we have these quintessential female images in our mind, and in the case of the male mind, they're grossly distorted. When you see something that reflects your id, it works for you.... Right from the beginning I said, 'She's got to have tits,' even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na'vi, aren't placental mammals. I designed her costumes based on a taparrabo, a loincloth worn by Mayan Indians." This is somewhat of a non-sequitor because both marsupials (kangaroos, etc.) and monotremes (platypuses, etc.) are non-placental and yet both lactate. This objective of making the Na'vi as humanlike as possible can also be seen as an explanation as to why they are quadrupedal despite having evolved from common ancestors of the hexapodal lemurs seen in the film.

Cameron has described Avatar as more "science fantasy" than true science fiction and has said that he would explain in the novel for the film why in the fictional universe the Na'vi look like humans.

Culture and language
According to Entertainment Weekly, "The Na'vi can commune with animals on their planet by literally plugging their braid into the creatures' nerve systems. To become a warrior, a Na'vi must tame and ride a flying creature known as Ikran." The Na'vi also use this neural bonding system, called "tsaheylu", to mate with a "life partner", a bond that, when made, cannot be broken in the Na'vi's lifetime. This is akin to human marriage.

The Na'vi way of life revolves around their religion, and the Home Tree. The Na'vi sleep in hammocks in large groups for comfort and as a warning system.

Conceived for the film was the Na'vi language, a constructed language often spoken by the actors when they played Na'vi characters. The Na'vi language was created by communications professor emeritus and linguistics consultant Paul Frommer of the University of Southern California. He designed the language so as to be speakable by human actors, combining syntactic and grammatical rules from other existing languages. Frommer created over a thousand words for the Na'vi language and coached the actors who narrated Na'vi characters. When communicating to humans in the film, Na'vi characters – especially Neytiri – speak in accented and broken English.

Human visitors see the Na'vi as possessing a religion, whose chief and possibly sole deity is a benevolent goddess known as Eywa. The Na'vi are able to physically connect to Eywa when they use their braids to connect to the Tree of Souls and other similar flora which function as the global brain's interfaces. Eywa is said to have a connection to all things Pandoran.

Political power is exceedingly diffused, with each clan being a sovereign entity under either the diarchical rule of both a temporal chieftain (known as an Olo'eyktan) and a spiritual chieftain (known as a Tsahik), or the monarchical rule of a single individual who holds the two separate offices simultaneously. The numerous clans are seemingly only ever brought together as a tribe by Toruk Makto, a messianic war chief whose office is both non-permanent and apparently the only one with an authority that covers the entire race of Na'vi. By the time of the film, there had only been five Toruk Maktos in the history of the tribe, and the last one had ruled no fewer than four generations before the present day. This may be due to the fact that the Toruk Maktos seem to draw their power from a situation of explicitly external danger, and therefore are not really necessary for the day to day internal running of the tribal clans. Succession to the various offices is smooth, however, based more on popular recognition and customary worthiness than on anything else, and respect for hierarchical superiors appears to be high.

Fauna
James Cameron's core idea for the Avatars fictional creatures was for them to be "superslick and aerodynamic, and be like a race car with racing stripes". Neville Page worked on Avatar as the lead creature designer. He, Wayne Barlowe (author, artist, and initial lead creature designer), and Yuri Bartoli (concept designer and supervising virtual art director) adapted Cameron's conceptions of the fauna into a design that served three purposes: to appear expressive, to function with animation technology, and to seem realistic. He and creature designer Wayne Barlowe sought to base the design of Pandora's creatures on race cars, but they struggled to adapt the concept. Page drew on his education in automotive design, recognizing the irony that race cars were based on real-life animals in having "bone lines". Existing automotive designs drew from seashells, turtle shells, and insects, so the designers returned the design to the fictional creatures. They found that the prime challenge in designing most creatures was to give them organic appearances, including skin texture. Some creatures were also designed to have special breathing holes located in the trachea, copying how cars have intakes. Challenges that the creatures posed for visual effects technicians were to form "walk and run" cycles for six-legged creatures and to impart credible flying for creatures that had four wings.  Many of the animals also have four eyes, with an apparent major and minor eye on either side of their head.

The fictional creatures are not connected telepathically according to Cameron and the designers. However, even though they discussed the idea of the creatures being part of Pandora's "Worldmind", they preferred to interpret the creatures as having heightened instincts. Page explained, "Animals are hooked up to this planet. We're the ones who are detached.... The way I dealt with it was, We have so much rich [material] here to reference, that we don't have to dream up a whole new process of animal awareness."

The fictional moon has less gravity than Earth, so the creatures' larger sizes match their environment. Most Pandoran wildlife is hexapodal, or six-legged. Much of the fauna and flora is bioluminescent, which is seen in creatures on Earth such as fireflies, many deep sea animals, and some microscopic algae. The aforementioned breathing holes, located on multiple parts of a creature's body other than the mouth, are similar to spiracles in some of Earth's animals. The flying reptile-like creatures in the film can be compared to extinct flying reptiles such as pterosaurs and to the modern gliding lizard Draco sumatranus.

List of fauna
 Direhorse (Pa'li in Na'vi) – The direhorse is a bioluminescent, hexapodal, superficially equine animal. It is scientifically known as Equidirus hoplites. The Na'vi use the direhorse to hunt. The direhorse was conceived and designed by Cameron and Stan Winston Studios. The direhorse is grey with blue stripes and stands  tall,  long. The Na'vi "break" a direhorse by connecting the fleshy tip of their hair to the animal's antennae. Xenobiologists call this a neural whip. Once intertwined, the Na'vi rider can communicate motor commands instantly through the neural interface; however, this connection does not lead to a lifelong, exclusive bond, as it does with the mountain banshee. Cameron described the creature as a "six-legged alien Clydesdale with moth-like antennae". The direhorse uses its long tongue to eat the sap out of pitcher plants.
 Mountain Banshee (Ikran in Na'vi) – The mountain banshee is an airborne predator which lives in mountainous territory on Pandora. Na'vi warriors attempt to bond with a banshee, a dangerous and required rite of passage. They are cousins to the great leonopteryx and they are scientifically known by xenobiologists as Pterodactylus giganteus. A banshee bonds to a Na'vi warrior for life. They are four-winged creatures that, like the leonopteryx and direhorse, have a biologically produced carbon fiber flexing on the skin. Neytiri had a banshee named Seze (translated from the language of the Na'vi roughly as "blue flower"). Page spent the most time designing the banshee for the film so it would be convincing when it flew or perched. The designer said, "The hardest thing of all was having a Na'vi on top of it and flying it. You had to backwards engineer it. It was like designing and engineering an aircraft." Barlowe, who contributed to the banshee's design, was influenced by manta rays and skates as well as relatively little-known pterosaurs and plesiosaurs that had "many, unique aerodynamic and hydrodynamic" characteristics. Like the color scheme for the great leonopteryx, color schemes based on Earth animals were used for various banshees, though Page was inspired by Art Nouveau prints to warp the schemes so they would not look familiar to film audiences.
 Great Leonopteryx (Toruk in Na'vi, meaning last shadow) – The great leonopteryx is the apex airborne predator native to Pandora. It is scientifically known as Leonopteryx rex, meaning "king lion-wing". The fierce beauty and nobility of the leonopteryx gave the species a place central to Na'vi lore and culture. The leonopteryx is scarlet with black stripes and a midnight blue crest on top of the head and on the lower jaw. It is celebrated in dance and song; elaborate totems symbolize both the fear and respect accorded to the creature. The leonopteryx is considered crucial to the Na'vi sense of destiny and interconnectedness. Prior to the events of the film, it had only been tamed five times, and Neytiri tells Jake that the riders (Toruk Makto) brought peace among the Pandoran tribes. This makes Jake the sixth Toruk Makto. He manages to capture one by jumping on it from above from his banshee but releases it after the battle with the humans has ended. The great leonopteryx and the banshee were designed with bright colors. Page based the colors on Earth's birds, poison dart frogs, and monarch butterflies, though he altered the patterns so that their inspirations would not be so conspicuous to moviegoers. The skull and crest shapes appear to be derived from pterosaurs from the genus Tapejara.
 Hammerhead Titanothere ('Angtsìk in Na'vi) – The hammerhead titanothere is a large hexapodal herbivore whose massive, low-slung head features bony projections on either side of the skull, similar to those of hammerhead sharks. These protrusions are often used to push and destroy objects: a single sideways thrust of the neck being sufficient to down a significantly sized tree. The titanothere has exceedingly thick, gray skin. There is a small "fan" feather structure on the head that it flares up as a warning symbol seen in the film and in the video game. The creature, which resembles a cross between a rhinoceros and a hammerhead shark, is easily aroused. Its hide is impervious to small arms fire, though firing on it is known to anger it. This massive, grazing creature travels in moderately large herds or packs of 10–20 animals. Avatar creature designer Yuri Bartoli explained about the creature's colorful threat display: "Originally, the hammerhead just had to be a huge creature, big enough that even a thanator would think twice about attacking one. A threat display is meant to be seen, so it required bright colors that would stand out against its more muted body". It is moderately social, but also extremely territorial and hierarchical. A soft ungulate mouth is protected by a rigid, beak-like jaw structure. The species is scientifically known as Titanotheris hammercephalis. In the climax of the film, a bunch of hammerhead titanothere assist the Na'vi in their battle against Colonel Miles Quaritch's army.
 Hexapede (Yerik in Na'vi) – The hexapede are hexapodal deer-like creatures. They are dark blue herbivores with white and yellow stripes. Twin horn structures sheathe a thin, patterned membrane structure. Their small, sloped skull is topped by this light-colored fan structure. This fan has an eye pattern on it similar to those found in actual insects. A skin membrane hangs under the jaw and runs the length of the neck. Twin lines of dark hairlike bristles run down the hexapede's back. The antennae are at the back at the head. As a threat display, the hexapede flares up its twin membrane structure like a satellite dish and retracts both lips. It is scientifically known as Sexcruscervus caeruleus.
 Prolemuris (Syaksyuk in Na'vi) – The prolemuris are blue, hexapodal creatures based on Earth's lemurs. They have two eyes, small nostrils, and their two upper arms on each side are partially fused. Like most Pandoran creatures, they have a queue on the back of their heads. They have lateral skin membranes on each side of the body. They have large eyes and grow 1.5 meters tall.
 Thanator (Palulukan in Na'vi) – The thanator is a large hexapodal land predator that is believed, by the RDA, to be the apex land predator. It is scientifically known as Bestiapanthera ferox. Cameron personally designed the creature. The thanator is first seen when Jake wanders off into the jungle and touches multiple helicoradian leaves, at which they retract to reveal a family of hammerhead titanotheres behind. The thanator frightens the titanotheres and pursues Jake. Jake later escapes the thanator by jumping off a cliff into pool below. It later appears during the climax where it assists Neytiri and later battles Quaritch's AMP Suit Beyond Glory, but is killed by the AMP suit's knife. The thanator is black with white fleshy skin under each hand. Its appearance is similar to a panther; Cameron describes the thanator as "the panther from hell". The thanator has ten sensory quills connected to six pads at the rear of the skull that flare up before it attacks the prey. The director explained how the thanator is the most fearsome creature on Pandora, "The thanator could eat a T-Rex and have the Alien for dessert."
 Viperwolf (Nantang in Na'vi) – The viperwolf is a hexapodal nocturnal carnivore. The species is scientifically known as Caniferratus costatus. It has bioluminescence for pack identification. Cameron described the viperwolves: "[They are] hairless with shiny skin that looks like overlapped armor. Most disturbing are its paws, which are like leathery hands." They are vicious in combat but treat their babies in a loving, nurturing way. They are seen in the daytime caring for their babies and have green eyes. They have a laugh which sounds like Earth's hyenas. Like most Pandoran creatures, they have antennae. They have opposable thumbs allowing them to climb trees as well as stalk from the ground, thereby are able to create a three-dimensional hunting field.
 Woodsprite (Atokirina in Na'vi) – The woodsprite is an animal, also called seed, of the "holy tree", appearing similar to airborne jellyfish. Neytiri describes them as very pure spirits, and slaps Jake for shooing two of them away. The Omaticaya Clan plants one of these seeds on the body of a deceased Na'vi, so the Na'vi's consciousness will become part of Eywa.

Flora
thumb|right|The Helicoradian plants in Avatar were based on Spirobranchus giganteus, a species of tube worm common to many seas on Earth. These worms quickly withdraw into their tubes when disturbed.

Flora on Pandora are of a tropical type several times taller than that existing on Earth. Many, if not all, plant and animal species have bioluminescent properties. The flora specimens seen in the film were all designed by Jodie Holt, a professor of botany at the University of California, Riverside. According to Holt, Pandoran flora are able to communicate with each other through signal transduction and are larger in size than Earth flora due to greater atmospheric thickness, weaker gravity, and stronger magnetism on Pandora.

List of flora
 Helicoradian (Loreyu in Na'vi) – The Helicoradian is a carnivorous plant that has red spiral-leaves. The plants are up to  tall and, when touched, instantly curl and collapse into themselves. They are zooplantae, part animal, part plant. They are first seen when Jake wanders off into a forest of Helicoradia and touches multiple leaves, at which they retract and coil up to reveal a hammerhead titanothere behind. According to Avatar designer Craig Shoji, the behavior and design of the Helicoradian was based on the Christmas tree worms, tube worms that reside on coral reefs. In the video games, the species has the ability to heal the player.
 Obesus rotundus (Rumut in Na'vi) – The Obesus rotundus is a tree that resembles a puffball tree.
 Pseudocycas altissima (Tsyorina'wll in Na'vi) – The Pseudocycas altissima is a plant akin to a tall Earth cycad.
 The Hometrees (Kelutral in Na'vi) – The Hometrees are great enough to house hundreds of clan members. The trees are honeycombed with natural hollows and alcoves in which the Na'vi sleep, eat, weave, dance, and celebrate their connection to Eywa. Adult Hometrees are more than  tall, and roughly  in diameter. The Omaticaya inhabit a Giant Hometree, standing roughly  tall. A distinguishable feature of the movie landscape, the tree itself is central to the movie story arc. Like many sacred sites on Pandora, the Giant Hometree sits above a large deposit of unobtanium. It is destroyed by the humans using rockets and missiles, which leads to the Na'vi clans' alliance against the humans.
  (Ayvitrayä Ramunong in Na'vi [Cameron: Vitraya Ramunong]) – The Tree of Souls is a tree where the Na'vi are able to communicate with the biological network that exists throughout Pandora. Cameron described the Tree of Souls as "a big input-output station", having been inspired by the bioluminescence that he encountered during night diving. In the film, the tree is seen to be capable of transferring a specific consciousness from one body to another.
  (Utral Aymokriyä in Na'vi [Cameron: Utraya Mokri]) – The Tree of Voices are the most important trees to the Na'vi after the Tree of Souls. They are smaller the Tree of Souls, but their appearance is quite similar and they too are illuminated. Neytiri reveals to Jake the tree allows the Na'vi to hear the voices of their ancestors. They are destroyed in the bulldozer attack by the humans. This was where Jake and Neytiri chose each other as mates and mated before Eywa.

Various other plants and trees that look like Earth's ferns, palm trees, mosses, grasses, bamboo, and succulents. Several forest plants of Pandora resemble the Earth's zoanthid soft corals, which can be bioluminescent as in the movie.

References

External links

 Pandorapedia.com
 "The Tet Zoo guide to the creatures of Avatar" at Tetrapod Zoology
 "The Complete History Of Pandora, According To Avatar's Designers" at Gizmodo
 Is the 'Avatar' Concept Really Possible? by CNN

Category:Avatar (franchise)
Category:Fantasy worlds
Category:Fictional moons

According to Cameron , the appearance of the Na'vi character Neytiri had some specific inspirations and requirements : she was inspired by Raquel Welch 's character in Fantastic Voyage and by Vampirella , noting in the latter 's case , " the fact [ Vampirella ] did n't exist did n't bother me because we have these quintessential female images in our mind , and in the case of the male mind , they 're grossly distorted .

PLAYBOY: Your new movie Avatar’s stereoscopic 3-D and CGI have people in the film industry and the media comparing its technological breakthrough to the birth of sound and color film. They’ve also predicted the movie could become a cultural phenomenon. Are you worried about Internet fans who have posted snarky comments about the preview footage shown in theaters in August?
CAMERON: The ones who were the most vocally negative will be there opening night, I promise you. The ones I worry about are those who haven’t heard of the movie. We know from the exit polling that the response was 95 percent ecstatic. Most of the five percent negative response is from the fanatic fans who imagined the movie in their minds but now have to deal with my movie.
PLAYBOY: Does this prejudgment remind you of 1997, when people predicted big failure for Titanic because it took so long to make, busted its budget and had no big stars?
CAMERON: They know Avatar is expensive, but that story hasn’t gathered any traction because—what the fuck?—I always make expensive movies, people always like them, and people always want me to do it again.
PLAYBOY: How will you react if critics come gunning for you?
CAMERON: Avatar is made very consciously for movie fans. If critics like it, fine. I can’t say I won’t read the reviews, because I may not be able to resist. I spent a couple of decades in the capricious world of being judged by those not knowledgeable about the depth and history of film and with whom I would not want to have a conversation—with a few notable exceptions. Why would I want to be judged by them? For me, this past decade has been about retreating to the great fundamentals, things that aren’t passing fads or subject to the whims of some idiot critic. You can’t write a review of the laws of thermodynamics.
PLAYBOY: Moviegoers have already been wowed by lifelike CG and motion-capture characters such as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. Will your blue-skinned aliens and gigantic monsters satisfy jaded audiences?
CAMERON: Ultimately audiences don’t give a rat’s ass how a movie is made. When people see the movie, the story will be about the world of the planet Pandora, the creatures on it, the characters—such as the former Marine and amputee played by Sam Worthington—and the huge conflict between the humans and the inhabitants of Pandora. How does it move you? How emotional is it? It’s pretty damn emotional and dramatic. That said, I think we certainly exceeded our expectations in making these characters feel real.
PLAYBOY: Audiences may not give a rat’s ass about how a movie is made, but didn’t you have to wait a decade before special effects technology could accommodate what you had in mind?
CAMERON: Here I was the CEO of a major digital effects company, Lightstorm, which was designed to create fantasy CG characters and was not doing that, so I said, “I’ll write a script that is beyond state of the art, we’ll make it, and it will force us to become a world leader in effects.” Everybody looked at what I had in mind and said I was crazy. In the wake of Titanic I saw how much a project can go off the rails, and I got a little more conservative about taking risks. So I put Avatar away because no one had yet accomplished the photo reality and human emotional expression we needed until Peter Jackson cracked the code with Gollum and King Kong. And Industrial Light & Magic was doing it in a completely different way in Pirates of the Caribbean. With Avatar it’s okay if the characters aren’t perfect. Who knows what aliens are supposed to look like?
PLAYBOY: How is film technology influencing how we process reality?
CAMERON: Human society and human consciousness are evolving before our eyes in an unprecedented, historic way as we adopt and integrate with our machines. Typically people don’t know when they’re making history, but we are definitely making history right now, for better or worse.
PLAYBOY: You’re a major techie, but does any current tech toy elude you?
CAMERON: On Twitter, a tweet has to be less than, what, 25 words? [Editor’s note: It’s 140 characters maximum.] There isn’t one concept I would be interested in discussing with anyone that could be summed up in 25 words or fewer. I’m totally not into Facebook or Twitter, so that makes me a dinosaur right there.
PLAYBOY: Sigourney Weaver’s character Ellen Ripley in your film Alien is a powerful sex icon, and you may have created another in Avatar with a barely dressed, blue-skinned, 10-foot-tall warrior who fiercely defends herself and the creatures of her planet. Even without state-of-the-art special effects, Zoe Saldana—who voices and models the character for CG morphing—is hot.
CAMERON: Let’s be clear. There is a classification above hot, which is “smoking hot.” She is smoking hot.
PLAYBOY: Did any of your teenage erotic icons inspire the character Saldana plays?
CAMERON: As a young kid, when I saw Raquel Welch in that skintight white latex suit in Fantastic Voyage—that’s all she wrote. Also, Vampirella was so hot I used to buy every comic I could get my hands on. The fact she didn’t exist didn’t bother me because we have these quintessential female images in our mind, and in the case of the male mind, they’re grossly distorted. When you see something that reflects your id, it works for you.
PLAYBOY: So Saldana’s character was specifically designed to appeal to guys’ ids?
CAMERON: And they won’t be able to control themselves. They will have actual lust for a character that consists of pixels of ones and zeros. You’re never going to meet her, and if you did, she’s 10 feet tall and would snap your spine. The point is, 99.9 percent of people aren’t going to meet any of the movie actresses they fall in love with, so it doesn’t matter if it’s Neytiri or Michelle Pfeiffer.
PLAYBOY: We seem to need fantasy icons like Lara Croft and Wonder Woman, despite knowing they mess with our heads.
CAMERON: Most of men’s problems with women probably have to do with realizing women are real and most of them don’t look or act like Vampirella. A big recalibration happens when we’re forced to deal with real women, and there’s a certain geek population that would much rather deal with fantasy women than real women. Let’s face it: Real women are complicated. You can try your whole life and not understand them.
PLAYBOY: How much did you get into calibrating your movie heroine’s hotness?
CAMERON: Right from the beginning I said, “She’s got to have tits,” even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na’vi, aren’t placental mammals. I designed her costumes based on a taparrabo, a loincloth thing worn by Mayan Indians. We go to another planet in this movie, so it would be stupid if she ran around in a Brazilian thong or a fur bikini like Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C.
PLAYBOY: Are her breasts on view?
CAMERON: I came up with this free—floating, lion’s-mane—like array of feathers, and we strategically lit and angled shots to not draw attention to her breasts, but they’re right there. The animation uses a physics-based sim that takes into consideration gravity, air movement and the momentum of her hair, her top. We had a shot in which Neytiri falls into a specific position, and because she is lit by orange firelight, it lights up the nipples. That was good, except we’re going for a PG-13 rating, so we wound up having to fix it. We’ll have to put it on the special edition DVD; it will be a collector’s item. A Neytiri Playboy Centerfold would have been a good idea.
PLAYBOY: So you’re okay with arousing PG-13 chubbies?
CAMERON: If such a thing should happen—and I’m not saying it will—that would be fine.
PLAYBOY: You reunited with Sigourney Weaver for the first time since Aliens, over 20 years ago. What took you so long?
CAMERON: She was my safest casting choice to play the botanist, which is why I didn’t want to cast her. I woke up one day and said, Don’t be a dumb shit; she’ll be perfect. Sig is worthy of awe, but she’s also goofy, funny, deeply committed to acting, wicked smart and really sweet. There’s no gun porn around her character in this film like there was for Ripley in Aliens, and she doesn’t have big clanging brass balls. Instead, she has a scholarly hippie dowdiness that makes her look as though she no longer fits civilization—a little like Dian Fossey, which is interesting because I had originally gotten Sig into the Fossey movie Gorillas in the Mist; I bailed, but she stuck with the project. I’m really happy with the cast. We went way out on a limb casting Sam Worthington, but he came through for us. So did Zoe. As for Sigourney, we get along great because I don’t have to be demanding with her; she is highly demanding of herself and me.
PLAYBOY: You have a rep for being demanding of everyone you work with. Ed Harris is rumored to have punched you on The Abyss and was quoted as saying the strain of making that 1989 movie had actors hurling couches out windows and smashing walls. Kate Winslet said making Titanic had her thinking, Please, God, let me die—and she nearly drowned.
CAMERON: I’ll cop to my faults, but I’ll also defend the situation in a rational way, and it goes like this: Isn’t the purpose of being attracted to something intense and challenging—such as, say, white-water rafting—to come out the other side and tell everybody how you almost died? It doesn’t mean you almost died. We simply let Kate think she was nearly drowning. A little sputtering and coughing does not count in my book, because I have almost drowned several times and know what it feels like. Asking God to please let you die? I was thinking the same thing at about the same point. Titanic was a catastrophic production financially and getting worse every day. Kate probably got some unnecessary stress from me, but I would say 99 percent of her stress was internally induced as part of her acting process.
PLAYBOY: You’re saying she was telling the press post-white-water-rafting stories?
CAMERON: The real question is “Would she work with me again?” I’m sure it would have to be the right material and all those things, but my guess is, absolutely. I’d certainly work with her again; she’s very talented. Whereas Leo DiCaprio switches his acting on and off like a faucet, Kate’s acting process is to internalize all this stuff and use it. She was carrying the whole burden of this enormous production on her back. I probably didn’t do enough to wrap the actors in cotton wool. The part of directing I wasn’t good at—and probably still am not the best at, although I’m better now—is the personal touch: letting people know you appreciate what they’re doing. Personally, I could not have operated under my direction back then; my pride wouldn’t have allowed it.
PLAYBOY: Have you ever thrown or taken a punch on a movie set?
CAMERON: Absolutely not. It would be an alien concept for me. But I won’t make a movie if I think I won’t be tested and it won’t be grueling for me, the crew, the actors. Anybody who signs on is going to be tested. So there are challenges, but it gets misconstrued that there was gross irresponsibility on the part of the production to put people into that situation, when in fact they wanted to be right there.
PLAYBOY: Some heard your “I’m king of the world” speech after winning the best director Oscar as a sure sign of a highly developed ego.
CAMERON: Titanic was wildly celebrated on every possible level, so sure, I knew how good that felt. It was almost like back in the 1980s when I got a taste of coke. That door opened a crack, and I saw a glimpse of what it was like to have something more powerful than you that you have to answer to. I put it down in, like, a week when most people—everybody around me—didn’t. Getting a glimpse through that door and seeing that accolades can be so capriciously withdrawn made me know I didn’t want to base my self-value on that.
PLAYBOY: How has working with underwater exploration crews instead of film crews in the past decade changed you?
CAMERON: People who have worked with me before think I’m just as crazy, but I think I’ve come back to moviemaking with a different perspective. On all my films prior to Avatar, the film was the one god you had to serve. Getting involved with NASA and various space projects and doing underwater exploration, I got to meet not only a diversity of people but also a diversity of cultures of thought. It was sobering and necessary to see that what we do in Hollywood means almost nothing to them. I look around the Hollywood landscape and see people who can’t or don’t want to exist outside that bubble. I don’t want to be one of them. Now I see moviemaking as officially a job.
PLAYBOY: What aspects of Hollywood mega success made you want to climb into submersibles and film documentaries starring sunken ships, instead of movies starring Leonardo DiCaprio?
CAMERON: I made Titanic because I wanted to dive to the shipwreck, not because I particularly wanted to make the movie. The Titanic was the Mount Everest of shipwrecks, and as a diver I wanted to do it right. When I learned some other guys had dived to the Titanic to make an IMAX movie, I said, “I’ll make a Hollywood movie to pay for an expedition and do the same thing.” I loved that first taste, and I wanted more.
PLAYBOY: So Titanic was a means to an end.
CAMERON: Titanic was about “fuck you” money. It came along at a point in my life when I said, “I can make movies until I’m 80, but I can’t do expedition stuff when I’m 80.” My father was an engineer. I had studied to be an engineer and had a mental restlessness to live the life I had turned my back on when I switched from the sciences to the arts in college.
PLAYBOY: You’ve been a diver for years. When you make so many potentially dangerous exploration dives, how much are your wife and kids on your mind?
CAMERON: Whenever we tout one of our documentary films we sort of emphasize the risk or that we’re going into unexplored territory, doing things few have done. The reality is it’s pretty darn safe. Having said that, it can be quite white-knuckle when something unexpected happens. I’ve spoken at NASAseminars and symposia about the nature of risk because I make action movies and have managed to lead seven deep-ocean expeditions with no fatalities or significant injuries. And my films have been relatively injury-free—well below the industry average—because we have a pretty rigorous approach to safety.
PLAYBOY: Do you observe any rituals when you’re about to climb into a submersible?
CAMERON: You don’t want to put a big emphasis on it because you’re there to do a job and stay focused. But every time I close the hatch of a submersible I say to whoever is gathered to see us off, “I’ll see you in the sunshine.” Of course there’s no sunshine down there, so to say that means you’re coming back to the surface. On most of our dives we come back at night because we stay way too long, and the only people waiting are a couple of bored deckhands. By that time the people who were waving and wishing you luck 16 hours earlier are asleep somewhere or drunk in their cabin.
PLAYBOY: As you mentioned, your father was an electrical engineer. Your mother was an artist and a nurse. How are you most like and most unlike them?
CAMERON: I’m a pretty representative fusion of their DNA, a Mendelian genetics experiment gone well. That created a lot of tension, though, because my father was very authoritarian and pragmatic, but my mom had a romantic sense of wanting to head for the hills, to explore. My mom used to nurture what I was about by taking me to the Royal Ontario Museum to draw. My idea of a great weekend was to spend it drawing, going hiking or building something, like a medieval siege engine.
PLAYBOY: You came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s. How did your parents view the sexual revolution, drugs and the antiwar movement?
CAMERON: They were pretty much against everything. I can’t think of anything my dad was for except hockey. He used to throw my comics and science-fiction books in the trash because he considered them mental junk. I’d go out, wipe off the coffee grounds and spaghetti and read them under the covers at night. He treated science fiction as if it was porn. I actually don’t think I had any porn, but I had the occasional playboy I kept well hidden.
PLAYBOY: You spent your first 17 years in Canada. Do you ever feel Canadian?
CAMERON: I went back to get an honorary degree at a Canadian university. When everybody stood and sang the national anthem, I stood onstage in front of a thousand Canadians just moving my lips because I had forgotten the words. I was never into the national anthem and never even went to a football game in high school, so I never had occasion to sing it.
PLAYBOY: You weren’t a high school jock?
CAMERON: In a small, very jocky school I was president of the science club, which consisted of me, some other lab rats and a Czechoslovakian girl who could barely speak English. I had been accelerated twice in elementary school, so I was two years younger than everybody and small. I hung out with the smart, wide-bell-bottomed, paisley-shirt, hair-down-the-middle-of-your-back counterculture rejects. I didn’t do drugs and looked like an accountant. Jocks would come up to me in the hall and punch me for no reason.
PLAYBOY: Have you since run into any of those guys?
CAMERON: Yes, and if you ever go to a 25th high school reunion, make sure that in the previous two months you’ve made the world’s highest-grossing movie, won 11 Academy Awards and become physically bigger than most of those guys who used to beat you up. I walked up to them one by one and said, “You know, I could take your ass right now, and I’m tempted, but I won’t.” Actually, they were all nice guys except for one who was still big and mean. I left him alone.
PLAYBOY: Did anything in your childhood predict you’d gravitate to the career you’re in today?
CAMERON: I could always get kids on my block to rally around some harebrained idea, such as, “Hey, let’s build an airplane.” It doesn’t occur to kids that you don’t build planes, but we built one that flew briefly until the ropes broke. A high school biology teacher encouraged us to do something interesting, so we started a theater arts program with a small group of kids craving something besides the football or basketball game. I did production design, lights and scenery and wrote and directed a little. Funny, but I didn’t immediately relate it to some kind of career path.
PLAYBOY: How did your life change when your father’s job relocated the Cameron family to Fullerton, California when you were 17?
CAMERON: In Canada there was a general resentment against America. We lived in a border town, and America was this huge culture generator that constantly bathed us in its radiation. To move to Los Angeles was to go into the belly of the beast. At first I thought the culture was all about cars. The kids seemed so shallow. I wanted to shake them and say, “Can’t you see how you’re destroying the earth with your materialistic values?” I started college six months after we moved, and of course I learned to drive. In the U.S., if you don’t have a car, or at least a license and your dad’s car, you’re not getting laid.
PLAYBOY: That’s pretty much in the fine print on most driver’s licenses. So you got laid?
CAMERON: Yeah, and I wound up marrying that girl seven years later. She was my girlfriend in college, on and off. We had a lot of fun. She was a waitress at Bob’s Big Boy, and I worked at a machine shop. We were just two blue-collar kids who’d go out to the desert and have a large time, drive cars fast and be hellions. I was shaking off all my practical conservatism—before that I hadn’t smoked dope, hadn’t driven fast. It’s a good thing I survived, is all I can say. And here I was living in the street-racing capital of southern California.
PLAYBOY: Did you do any street racing?
CAMERON: Hell yeah! All my new friends had hot rods and almost killed me a bunch of times on rides—accidentally spinning out or sliding backward down a freeway off-ramp because they thought they were such good drivers. After enduring these white-knuckle terror rides for about a year, I got a 1969 Mach 1 Mustang and made it really fast by tearing apart the engine, lowering it, putting in Coney shocks, putting the battery in the back to transfer the weight. I stripped everything off it and made my own kind of fiberglass hood and spoiler—all the stuff you now just buy aftermarket.
PLAYBOY: Were you good at street racing?
CAMERON: I got good by systematically taking my friends—the ones who white-knuckled me—for their karmic rides. After that they never rode with me again. I’d go out on my own at three or four a.m. and teach myself to drive really fast, then go out on wet nights and drive sideways for hours, putting myself into a drift to learn how to get out of it. There was no name for that then, but now we call it drifting.
PLAYBOY: Do you ever let loose behind the wheel now?
CAMERON: As a family man and father of five, especially two teenagers, I have to lead by example. For me to get in a dumb wreck racing would send the wrong signal. What’s also taken the fun out of it is that there’s no place you can drive fast anymore.
PLAYBOY: What were your earliest jobs?
CAMERON: My first job was at 15, working as an assistant to a crazy Viennese pastry chef in a giant restaurant that served 1,500 dinners a night in Niagara Falls, near where I grew up. A certain kind of showmanship gets in your blood when you grow up in a tourist town. In college in California I worked as a machinist, a bus mechanic, a precision tool and die maker, a high school janitor, whatever I could find. I’m pretty blue collar. I swear like a blue-collar guy when I’m on the set.
PLAYBOY: How did you make the transition to moviemaking?
CAMERON: I loved to write, draw and paint, but I also loved physics and astronomy. No career path seemed to reconcile those two directions except science fiction. Two of my closest friends in Fullerton were interested in filmmaking, but there was no film program. We formed a dumb-ass group of eventually four people, and every week one of us made his own little movie in which the other three would have to act, do stunts, set themselves on fire—whatever was necessary. Later we wrote a script and got it to a tax-sheltered group made up mostly of dentists and an investment guy who had dreams of doing Star Wars. We got $20,000 from them, rented a $200,000 camera that we completely disassembled because we had no idea how to operate it, and we made a movie even though we were monkeys and had no idea what we were doing.
PLAYBOY: What impact did Star Wars and George Lucas have on you?
CAMERON: My entrée into Hollywood came as a direct result of Star Wars because George Lucas suddenly made science fiction gold instead of a ghettoized B-movie genre. When most people saw Star Wars there was the shock of the new. For me there was the shock of recognition, as if somebody had taken my private dream and put it up on the screen. I had gone through the same evolution George had: writing, drawing and envisioning these hyperkinetic World War II dogfights in outer space. Good thing I’m not paranoid, the kind of schizo who thinks the CIA is spying on his thoughts and then has to wear tinfoil on his head. I took Star Wars as a sign that what I had to offer was something people wanted.
PLAYBOY: Your experience with amateur films helped you get a foot in the door of low-budget filmmaking with Roger Corman’s company, where you made miniature models and designed sets for Rock’n’ Roll High School and Battle Beyond the Stars.
CAMERON: On a Corman film everybody just rose to his or her own level—the opposite of the Peter Principle, in a way. You didn’t think of a career; you thought, What’s my next opportunity? If you got an opportunity to direct, you didn’t question it. Ron Howard didn’t question it when he got Grand Theft Auto; Francis Ford Coppola didn’t question it when he got to do Dementia 13. These are kind of junk movies, but we were interested in the process, in learning. That’s where I met writer-producer Gale Hurd, and the recognition that we would make a great team was pretty instantaneous. It took only a year or two for us to make a movie together.
PLAYBOY: The movie you made together in 1984, The Terminator, got you your first big directing job and made a star of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Did Schwarzenegger’s ascendancy in Hollywood and politics surprise you?
CAMERON: If you’ve known him for even a short time, you’re not surprised by anything he accomplishes. He used to say, “You don’t program yourself for failure; you program yourself for success.” At first I thought it was just macho bullshit. But I’ve subsequently made many decisions using that principle, especially in recent years. The decision to show 16 minutes of Avatar to the public during a special Avatar Day was based on the principle of programming myself for success.
PLAYBOY: Niagara Falls, near where you spent your childhood, is a favorite wedding spot. Did growing up there make you hyperaware of marriage?
CAMERON: I don’t know, but I have been married five times. I’m a perfectionist, so I kept trying until I got it right, which I have, I’m happy to report. Suzy Amis is a keeper. They were all great women, but there are people you can love and later not like, or it can be your rhythms and energies are too disparate to function together as partners. I found—and this was the big one—you have to work at it. Before that I had this attitude, Well, I’ll do this until it doesn’t work, and then I’ll bail. You’ll never stay married if you have that attitude.
PLAYBOY: What caused the attitude shift?
CAMERON: It was something a therapist said. I don’t believe in shrinks, and they’re not part of my life, but in this particular case I had agreed to go because it might help, and he gave me something that has stuck with me as a philosophy. He said, “You don’t do this for her; you do this for you, so things make sense to you.” You get into a relationship and make certain promises, and you have to live by a code, a set of values, for your own reasons, not to please the other person. Your word is your bond. It doesn’t matter what kind of money is involved or how the situation subsequently changes. You have to be smart enough to go into a situation knowing the dangers, and you have to live by the agreements you make going in.
PLAYBOY: Three of your four ex-wives—Gale Hurd, Linda Hamilton and Kathryn Bigelow—are prominent in the movie business. If director Bigelow asked for your opinion of her film The Hurt Locker, could you be honest without the discussion reopening old wounds?
CAMERON: Kathryn and I are still close, and we’d work together on a film tomorrow. The key is to be honest but diplomatic, constructive, not destructive. She was interested in my input on The Hurt Locker, and I basically said, “You did a great job, and I wouldn’t change a frame,” and it was true in that case. She has seen Avatar at different stages and given good input. Her current partner, Mark Boal, who wrote The Hurt Locker, gave me notes as well. It’s very collegial. I don’t have a lot of those relationships, but I value the ones I do have.
PLAYBOY: When director McG’s Terminator Salvation was up against Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen at the box office last summer, McG said, “Michael Bay has a big cock, but I’d like to believe mine is bigger. If he’s up for it, we can reveal ourselves on the Spartacus steps at Universal and put the question to rest.” As co-writer and director of two Terminator movies, would you have been willing to drop trou with them to settle the matter?
CAMERON: No, I prefer we keep work and play separate. Being a good director probably doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the size of one’s penis, big toe, thumb size or anything else. That’s about the dumbest fucking thing you could ever say. I’m surprised he didn’t call me out.
PLAYBOY: As someone who has been accused of going off on the set, what do you make of those leaked tapes of Christian Bale berating a crew member on Terminator Salvation?
CAMERON: The Avatar crew all thought that was a hoot, and for the next few days we were all quoting what I thought was an inspired rant. The joke is I’m a tyrannical guy, but I said, “Man, I have to take my hat off to this guy. I could not pull a rant like that if I had to.” I mean, I can get on a roll but not like that. I just had to bow down.
PLAYBOY: How old do you consider yourself to be emotionally?
CAMERON: Probably 14, and I’m happy about that. In some ways I’m even younger than that because I never want to lose the intellectual curiosity—of always wanting to know how stuff works and wanting to put things together with my hands. I can relate very well to my six-year-old, who’s always building something. If I let him go he’d just take off into the woods and not come back until the end of the day, just like I used to do as a kid.
PLAYBOY: Are you already plotting how you might top Avatar?
CAMERON: I haven’t decided. I always say that when a woman is in the midst of childbirth, don’t ask her if she wants another child. I’m crowning right now.

Question: what vampire book does neytiri get inspiration from

Answer: Vampirella

what vampire book does neytiri get inspiration from

Question: who is the na'vi in vampire diaries

Answer: Neytiri

Question: who is the Na'vi character based on

Answer: Raquel Welch

Question: raquel welch's character in which book inspired neytiri

Answer: Fantastic Voyage

raquel welch's character in which book inspired neytiri

Question: what was the male mind like in vampirella

Answer: grossly distorted

what was the male mind like in vampirella

Question: what character in fantastic voyage inspired neytiri

Answer: Raquel Welch's

what character in fantastic voyage inspired neytiri

Question: what is wrong with the male mind in vampirella

Answer: distorted

what is wrong with the male mind in vampirella

Question: where did neytiri get her inspiration for her character

Answer: Raquel Welch's character in Fantastic Voyage

where did neytiri get her inspiration for her character

To become a warrior , a Na'vi must tame and ride a flying creature known as Ikran . "

The Na'vi also use this neural bonding system , called " tsaheylu " , to mate with a " life partner " , a bond that , when made , can not be broken in the Na'vi 's lifetime .

The sex scene was cut from the cinema version of James Cameron's 3D sci-fi adventure which is close to taking $1 billion (£621m) at the worldwide box office.
It features the giant blue avatar of paraplegic US Marine Jake Sully locking hair with his love interest, Neytiri.
Cameron said: "We had it in [the movie] and we cut it out so that will be something for the special edition DVD – if you want to see how they have sex."
Actress Zoe Saldana, who plays Neytiri, said the sex involves the same process the alien race uses to communicate on its fictional home planet.
In the film, communication takes place by locking hair with flora and fauna, in a process known as "synching."
Saldana said: "If you sync to your banshee and you're syncing to a tree, why not sync into a person?
"It was a very funny scene to shoot because there were so many technical things that sometimes you have to keep in mind that paying attention to all those might disrupt the fluidity of how a scene is supposed to take place."
The actress said the scene was left out originally because the film was aimed at a family audience.

Question: what is the flying creature that a na'vi must tame to become a warrior

Answer: Ikran

Question: what is the name of the neural bonding system used by na'vi

Answer: tsaheylu

what is the name of the neural bonding system used by na'vi

Question: what does a na'vi have to do to become a warrior

Answer: To become a warrior

what does a na'vi have to do to become a warrior

Question: what kind of partner do the na'vi have

Answer: life partner

Question: what does a na'vi need to become

Answer: warrior

Question: what type of creature is ikran

Answer: flying

Question: what type of creature is a na'vi warrior to tame

Answer: flying creature known as Ikran

what type of creature is a na'vi warrior to tame

Question: what type of system does the na'vi use to mate with a life partner

Answer: neural bonding system

Conceived for the film was the Na'vi language , a constructed language often spoken by the actors when they played Na'vi characters .

The Na'vi language was created by communications professor emeritus and linguistics consultant Paul Frommer of the University of Southern California .

U.S.O. Project meets Paul Frommer, linguist and developer for the long-awaited film Avatar with James Cameron of the whole language and culture for the fictional indigenous race of Pandora called Na’vi.
Fictional languages are by far the largest group of artistic languages. Fictional languages are intended to be the languages of a fictional world, and are often designd with the intent of giving more depth and an appearance of plausibility to the fictional worlds with which they are associated, and to have their characters communicate in a fashion which is both alien and dislocated.
Fictional languages are by far the largest group of artistic languages. Fictional languages are intended to be the languages of a fictional world, and are often designd with the intent of giving more depth and an appearance of plausibility to the fictional worlds with which they are associated, and to have their characters communicate in a fashion which is both alien and dislocated.
[Paul R. Frommer - marshallapps.usc.edu]
Matteo Milani: Can you describe your background activities and your previous experiences at USC before working with James Cameron?
Paul Frommer: My undergraduate degree, from the University of Rochester in New York, is in Mathematics. Soon after graduating, I spent two years in Terengganu, Malaysia as a United States Peace Corps volunteer, where I taught English as a Second Language and also mathematics, the latter in the Malay language. Although I had studied foreign languages prior to that (Hebrew, French, Latin, German), it was during my time in Malaysia that I really fell in love with languages. I decided to do my graduate work in linguistics and entered the doctoral program at USC.
While I was a graduate student, I had the opportunity to teach for a year in Iran, which was a wonderful experience. Returning to USC, I completed my dissertation on a topic in Persian grammar. Then, after several more years of teaching, I switched careers and entered the business world, becoming a strategic planner and business writer for a Los Angeles corporation.
My return to academia led me in a new direction: business communication. I joined USC’s Marshall School of Business as a full-time faculty member in 1996, teaching in the department now known as the Center for Management Communication. I became chair of that department in 2005 and served in that capacity until 2008.
MM: Traveling back to 2005, how and when did you meet the director?
MM: Traveling back to 2005, how and when did you meet the director?
PF: During the summer of 2005, Lightstorm Entertainment, James Cameron’s production company, sent an e-mail to the USC linguistics department inquiring about a linguist who might be able to develop an alien language for a new movie. That e-mail was forwarded to me, and I jumped on it. I expressed my strong interest in the project and sent Cameron a copy of the linguistics workbook I had co-authored — Looking at Languages: A Workbook in Elementary Linguistics. A week or two later I was called in for an interview. I spent a very stimulating 90 minutes with Cameron in his offices in Santa Monica, where we discussed his vision for the movie and the language. At the end, I was thrilled when he shook my hand and said, “Welcome aboard.”
MM: What were his initial requests?
PF: Well, he wanted a complete language, with a consistent sound system (phonology), word-building rules (morphology), rules for putting words together into phrases and sentences (syntax), and a vocabulary (lexicon) sufficient for the needs of the script. He also wanted the language to be pleasant sounding and appealing to the audience.
"We created the language of the Na’vi starting about the time that I was doing the shooting draft of the script [...] Dr. Paul Frommer, who was with USC (University of Southern California) at the time, spent about a year creating the language. The trick was we had the language before we actually cast most of the parts. So the casting director, Margery Simkin, had to learn a bit of Na’vi so that she could get the auditioning actors to repeat the sounds of the language. If they couldn’t make the sounds, they couldn’t have the part.[James Cameron - via inquirer.net]
The studio asked me the same question. They asked, “Do they have to have tails?” We’re very happy with the way the Na’vi worked out because what we found is the tail and the ears show the characters’ emotional state. A cat owner knows that you can tell a cat’s mood by what its tail is doing. Just as we created a verbal language, we created a vocabulary for the tail and the ears."
The studio asked me the same question. They asked, “Do they have to have tails?” We’re very happy with the way the Na’vi worked out because what we found is the tail and the ears show the characters’ emotional state. A cat owner knows that you can tell a cat’s mood by what its tail is doing. Just as we created a verbal language, we created a vocabulary for the tail and the ears."
"I've discovered over the years that a voice needs to sync with body movements as precisely as it does with lip movement, in order for the sound to most effectively bond with the character."
[Ben Burtt - an excerpt from Galactic Phrase Book & Travel Guide: Beeps, Bleats, Boskas, and Other Common Intergalactic Verbiage]
MM: Can you reveal the process of creating the Na'vi language? What are the major difficulties in creating a phonetic system with its own style, consistency, and unique character?
PF: I didn’t quite start from zero, since Cameron had devised 30 or 40 words of his own for the original script—some character names, place names, names of animals, etc. That gave me a bit of a sense of what kinds of sounds he had in mind.
The next step was to develop the phonetics and phonology—the sounds that would and would not appear in the language, along with the rules for combining sounds into syllables and words and the pronunciation rules that might in certain circumstances change one sound into another. The major constraint, of course, was that although Na’vi is an alien language, it has to be spoken by human actors, and so the sounds it included had to be ones that the actors would be able to reproduce.
To create some interest, I included a group of sounds not often found in western languages—“ejectives,” which are popping-like sounds that I notated as kx, px, and tx. I also needed to determine what other elements in the language would be “distinctive”—that is, would be able to differentiate words: for example, stress (the eventual answer was yes), vowel length (no) and tone (no). I presented Cameron with three different “sound palettes” or possibilities for the overall sonic impression of the language—he chose one, and we were off!
The next step was to decide on the morphology and syntax. For those, I was on my own. Since this was an alien language spoken on another world, I wanted to include structures and processes that were relatively rare in human languages but that could be acquired by humans, since according to the plot of the movie, a number of humans had learned to speak the language. The verbal morphology, for example, is achieved exclusively through infixes, which are less common than prefixes and suffixes. And the nouns have a system of case marking, known as a tripartite system, that’s possible but quite rare in human languages.
"Overall, the creation of alien languages has been the hardest task. A language, or more accurately, the sensation of language, has to satisfy the audience's most critical faculties. We are all experts at identifying the nuances of intonation. Whether we understand a given language or not, we certainly process the sound fully and attribute meaning--perhaps inaccurate--to the emotional and informational content of the speech. Our minds are trained to recognize and process dialogue. The task, therefore, of creating a language is all the more difficult because of the strength of the audience's perception."
[Ben Burtt - an excerpt from Galactic Phrase Book & Travel Guide: Beeps, Bleats, Boskas, and Other Common Intergalactic Verbiage]
MM: How did you make the Na'vi dialogue sound "real"? How difficult was it to make the dialogue believable?
PF: Well, that was really more a matter for the actors—and it was quite a challenge. They had to learn their lines in a language no one had ever heard before, including learning to make unusual sounds and sound combinations, and then they had to act convincingly in that language! That involved not only memorizing the sentences but mastering the stress and intonation, so that they could place emphasis in the right place. It wasn’t easy, but they did a remarkable job.
I met with all seven of the Na’vi-speaking actors off-set before their scenes were shot to help them with the pronunciation, and I also supplied recordings in the form of mp3 files so that they could listen to and absorb the dialog.
MM: Is there a “gold standard” for constructed language that served as an inspiration to you?
PF: In terms of “alien” languages, that would have to be Klingon, the language developed by linguist Marc Okrand for the Star Trek series. It’s a very impressive piece of work—a rough-sounding language with a complex and difficult phonology and grammar that now has a devoted base of followers. There are Klingon clubs all over the world where people meet to speak the language, and there’s even a translation of Hamlet into Klingon! If Na’vi ever came close to that kind of following, I’d be delighted.
MM: Do the Na’vi have their own alien writing system?
PF: No, the Na’vi don’t have a writing system, so that was one thing I didn’t have to bother with. But of course I needed to devise a consistent orthography, based on the Roman alphabet, to write down the language for descriptive purposes and transcribe the words and sentences for the actors.
MM: Did you develop a vocabulary?
PF: Yes, I developed it on an as-needed basis. That is, the words I came up with first were those that appeared in the script. This past May, when I translated dialog for the Avatar video game, I faced new situations that required words I didn’t yet have, so that was an opportunity to expand the lexicon further.
"Part of my research was to identify interesting real languages to use as a basis for alien ones. The advantage of using a real language is that it possesses built-in credibility. A real language has all the style, consistency, and unique character that only centuries of cultural evolution can bring. I found that if I relied on my familiarity with English, my imagined "alien" language would just be a reworking of the all-too-familiar phonemes of everyday general American speech. I had to break those boundaries, to search for language sounds that were uncommon and even unpronounceable by most of the general audience."
[Ben Burtt - an excerpt from Galactic Phrase Book & Travel Guide: Beeps, Bleats, Boskas, and Other Common Intergalactic Verbiage]
MM: An "a posteriori" language is any constructed language whose vocabulary is based on existing languages, either as a variation of one language or as a mixture of various languages, unlike "a priori" constructed languages (e.g. Klingon). How did you first search for some exotic languages that would act as inspiration?
PF: I didn’t base Na’vi on any particular human language. In terms of its sound, I thought that the original words Jim Cameron had come up with had a bit of a Polynesian flavor, and I included those sounds in the language. But I added a lot beyond that, so that I don’t believe that Na’vi sounds like any specific existing language.
As I mentioned, there’s nothing in Na’vi that couldn’t be found in some human language—and that’s important, since humans have learned to speak it. However, the particular combination of elements in Na’vi—its sound system, morphology, and syntax—is unique.
Avatar producer Jon Landau to discuss making James Cameron's vision a reality.
And a linguist invented the Na'vi language—did you pick up any?
I have enough trouble with English! I could say a few words in Na'vi, but not much. Na'vi is a hard language. When I knew we had to create a language for the movie, I thought, okay, you go hire someone and say, 'This is the word we have to say.' And they'd come up with the word. I was wrong. Paul Frommer, our linguist, took six months just to define the structure of language, which I thought was fascinating. And after that, he'd start coming up with the sentences that we needed.
Does it have parallels to any language on earth?
I think it's relatively unique. We didn't want someone to hear it and go, 'Wow, that's Watusi!” Or Maori, or French.
[via boxoffice.com]
MM: The upcoming score by James Horner will feature vocals in the Na'vi language. Would you like to describe your experience with the singers during those recordings?
PF: That was a lot of fun! James Cameron had written the lyrics for six songs, four of which I translated into Na’vi. (It was interesting to try to write poetry in the language!) Then at various times I met with music director James Horner, his associates, and the singers who had to sing in Na’vi to help them pronounce the words of the songs. For some of the recording sessions, the music was fluid and developed on the spot, which I found a wonderfully creative process. For one session, though, there was already pre-composed music written out on a musical staff. I’m a pianist and I have a musical background, so I was able to read the music with the singer and help him fit the words to the melody.
Thanks, Paul. Congratulations and continue the good work!
(Listen to Frommer give Na'vi lessons to NPR.org)
read more:
[USC professor creates an entire alien language for 'Avatar' - via LA Times HeroComplex]
[Brushing up on Na'vi, the Language of Avatar - via vanityfair.com]
[USC professor gives Avatar aliens a voice - via dailytrojan.com]
[The language of Avatar revealed - via bbc.co.uk]
[Na'vi talk down Klingon as the last word in alien-speak - via entertainment.timesonline.co.uk]
[Do You Speak Na'vi? Giving Voice To 'Avatar' Aliens - via npr.org]
[Language Design for Sound Designers - via Darren Blondin]
www.avatarmovie.com
twitter.com/officialavatar

Question: who came up with the na'vi language

Answer: Paul Frommer

Question: where was paul frommer from

Answer: University of Southern California

Question: what language did the actors speak in the movie

Answer: Na'vi language

what language did the actors speak in the movie

Question: what type of professor was paul frommer

Answer: communications

Question: what was the na'vi language in the movie

Answer: a constructed language

what was the na'vi language in the movie

Fauna James Cameron 's core idea for the Avatars fictional creatures was for them to be " superslick and aerodynamic , and be like a race car with racing stripes " .

If you thought the creatures on the planet Pandora look sleeker and more like race cars than your standard monsters, then it's not an accident. It turns out that race cars were part of their early designs, and some of that made it into the final movie.
Early on in the process, James Cameron "mentioned the core idea" of having Pandora's creatures be "superslick and aerodynamic, and be like a race car with racing stripes," says creature designer Neville Page, who started out as an industrial product designer.
So he and fellow creature designer Wayne Barlowe both worked on creature designs based on race-cars, and Barlowe came up with some "trippy" ideas, based on combining the curves of a Formula 1 car with "cetacean lines," from a whale or dolphin. Some of those designs were too "wild" to make it into the movie," says Barlowe.
For his part, Page strugged to come up with designs that included a race-car feel. "I wasn't able to get it to work," he says, "and honestly, about a year into it, it somehow gelled for me." Page used his education in automotive design and the "automotive form language" to inspire animal forms. The irony is, automotive design language is actually based on real-life animals to begin with, and "in the automotive world, lines on a car are referred to as bone lines," says Page, "in the sense of bones having specific ridges and edges." Car desgins draw on seashells, turtle shells or insects, so he was bringing those shapes back to the animal world and making them more stylized.
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The biggest problem with these car-inspired designs was how to make them organic. "That was one of the problems Jim had with what I was doing, was that it's cool-looking form-wise, but it isn't organic yet," says Page. "If you literally took an Orca whale and made a mold of it and put it in gray primer, it would look toylike, because there's no excessive skin texturing... That was the hardest thing with our characters, was to prove that we could get them [to look] organic."
But not all of the creature designs in Avatar were based on car imagery. Barlowe says his early designs for the flying dragon creatures, the Mountain Banshees, were actually based on sea life:
I was influenced by manta rays and skates - sea life motifs were prevalent in my thoughts at the time - when it came to my initial concepts. Their lines informed everything from wings to head profiles. And, yes, being a huge paleontology buff did make me think of the vast variety of relatively little-known pterosaurs and plesiosaurs with their many, unique aerodynamic and hydrodynamic solutions.
Barlowe adds that he was careful to avoid being influenced by monsters from any other movies, or books for that matter, because audiences are so well-educated these days, they'll spot any similarities to something they've seen before a mile away.
Cameron even came up with the idea that the some of the creatures would have a special breathing hole. Says Page: "Jim always had this idea of having the animal not only breathe potentially through its oral cavity, but through a tracheal stock, which he's calling the Operculum." Basically, it's a hole in the clavicular region, similar to what you'd have after a tracheotomy. It was the one spot where Cameron felt you could "have a hole penetrate through a creature and still have the muscle and bone do what they do," says Page.
It gets back to the automotive design idea — Page started thinking of these extra breathing holes as "intakes," that would allow the creatures to move faster by taking in more air. "You want a place where you can draw the most air in terms of great energy and physical expense," he says.
Cameron had his own ideas for many of the creatures on Pandora, but especially the Thanator, that giant killer monster that nearly eats Jake Sully, was Cameron's baby, Barlowe explains:
The Thanator is, indeed, extremely cool. Jim had a very proprietorial approach to that one - hands off my Thanator! He really wanted to design it himself. I was not in L.A. when he created it. I can only guess that it was the product of many cups of coffee and Jim's urge to create the Ultimate Predator. However, with all of that said, it does fit perfectly into the overall aesthetic of the world. Jim clearly wanted it to look integrated into the sensibility of Pandora and yet be that dynamic apex predator that we see so frighteningly real on the screen.
Page adds that it's not exactly true that Pandora's creatures are connected telepathically — Cameron and the designers talked about the idea that Pandora had a kind of "Worldmind," but they didn't want to make it too confusing for the viewers, on top of everything else. Instead, it's more like a kind of heightened instinct. Like the way your dog or cat will know that another large animal is coming into your yard several minutes before you do. Or the way your dog might know an earthquake is coming, a while in advance. Says Page, "Animals are hooked up to this planet. We're the ones who are detached... The way I dealt with it was, We have so much rich [material] here to reference, that we don't have to dream up a whole new process of animal awareness."

Question: what are the avatars called

Answer: Fauna

Question: who came up with the avatars

Answer: James Cameron

Question: what did james cameron want avatars to be

Answer: superslick and aerodynamic

what did james cameron want avatars to be

Question: what did james cameron want the avatars to be like

Answer: racing stripes

what did james cameron want the avatars to be like

Question: what was the original idea of the avatars

Answer: "superslick and aerodynamic

what was the original idea of the avatars

Question: what did james cameron want the avatars to be

Answer: aerodynamic

what did james cameron want the avatars to be

Neville Page worked on Avatar as the lead creature designer.

Neville Page worked on Avatar as the lead creature designer .

He , Wayne Barlowe ( author , artist , and initial lead creature designer ) , and Yuri Bartoli ( concept designer and supervising virtual art director ) adapted Cameron 's conceptions of the fauna into a design that served three purposes : to appear expressive , to function with animation technology , and to seem realistic .

Movies have all kinds of designers, including production designers, sound designers and costume designers. For heavily CG movies like “Avatar,” though, a new profession has emerged: concept designer.
Neville Page, who has the official title “lead creature designer” on “Avatar,” and was also a concept and creature designer on “Star Trek,” told Daily Variety that what concept designers do “doesn’t really have to be built or realized in the physical world. It’s a designer who will imagine things that haven’t been seen or never will actually be seen in real life.”
Page relies on Z Brush software to create “digital sculptures” of creatures. Those digital sculptures are handed off to the vfx department’s animators — and to toy designers and Happy Meal designers, as the case may be.
He also relies on an unusual high-tech tool: the Objet three-dimensional printer. It works like an inkjet printer, but instead of ink, it lays down numerous thin layers of plastic to build up a three-dimensional model. Page used the Objet for rapid prototyping on “Star Trek.”
On “Avatar,” Page was charged with taking auteur James Cameron’s visions of alien beasts and turning them into designs that were expressive, would work in animation and seemed believable enough for the audience to accept. “You have to be careful you don’t get too creative or too wacky, because most people can tell when it just doesn’t feel right,” he said.
Of the many Pandoran animals of “Avatar,” Page worked the longest on the flying banshees. “Flying creatures are really hard to design,” he said, “because it’s not just one position you see them in.”
After so much work on the banshees, he admits to becoming “emotionally invested” in them. “I think you have a successful design when you start to really feel for what you’re designing.”

Question: neville page was the lead creature designer for which film

Answer: Avatar

neville page was the lead creature designer for which film

Question: who was the lead creature designer for avatar

Answer: Neville Page

who was the lead creature designer for avatar

Question: who was the concept designer and supervising virtual art director

Answer: Yuri Bartoli

Question: who was the initial lead creature designer

Answer: Wayne Barlowe

who was the initial lead creature designer

Question: how many purposes did the design of avatar serve

Answer: three

how many purposes did the design of avatar serve

Question: what were the three purposes for the design of the creature

Answer: to appear expressive

what were the three purposes for the design of the creature

Question: who was the lead creature designer

Answer: Neville Page worked on Avatar

Question: what did the designers want the design to be

Answer: realistic

what did the designers want the design to be

Some creatures were also designed to have special breathing holes located in the trachea , copying how cars have intakes .

Challenges that the creatures posed for visual effects technicians were to form " walk and run " cycles for six - legged creatures and to impart credible flying for creatures that had four wings .

Avatar: The Game Changer
"And somebody as mind-expanding and pragmatic as Joe [Letteri] has to be able to see it and put it into a system. And I remember when he said early on that we're going to have to grow these forests. And it wasn't a matter of creating layers of things that looked like forests. But to actually grow an environment so that it could be evocative of life. It's the thing that I found that would enhance your movie."
Indeed, for Letteri and the entire Weta Digital team, Avatar exceeds Lord of the Rings and King Kong in both complexity and achievement. In fact, Weta worked on 1,800 out of approximately 2,200 shots. But the experience transcends mere shot count.
"We made low-resolution models of everything for the stage," Letteri says. "In cases where we were far enough along to have high-resolution models, we down res'd those and prepped those for the stage, textured them up and made sure there was a back and forth so that whatever we were sending them would work on the stage: made sure the rigging worked for the MoCap system and for our animation system; if we were updating a model, we'd send it to them; if they needed to make any changes on the stage for rigging purposes, they'd send them to us. It was a pretty good workflow.
"Jim, of course, would capture everything and then go back and do his cameras on it and put together what he called templates, which are MotionBuilder renders run back out in realtime, but played back through the cameras that he had captured, and that's what he used for editing."
Letteri echoes that this whole new virtual system was a real director-centric breakthrough. "It's no longer the director saying, 'Give me something that looks like this.' It's Jim picking up the camera and saying, 'Here's my shot; now you guys take it and make it look real.'
"For Avatar, we had seven main and 14 secondary speaking parts. And we had to turn that into 200 or so for the Na'vi clan, who don't speak but who are still very expressive. It required a whole new level of building characters and environments. The trick for the land creatures was working out a believable six-legged walk and run cycle and the flying creatures had four wings, so we had to figure out how to make them fly without the wings getting in the way."
According to Andrew Jones, the animation director, there was a lot of R&D "figuring out the best model type and most resolution to pack in there and really get the rig to behave well and still not be too slow for animators. The facial rig was within Maya but with plug-ins. We had hoped for a full muscle-based system but wound up going for a blend-shape system but using muscles as the basis for the controls. At any one time, we could swap in a muscle system and see what it looked like, but any of the blend-shapes went much faster."
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Question: what part of the body did the creatures have breathing holes

Answer: trachea

what part of the body did the creatures have breathing holes

Question: what kind of creatures were the walk and run cycles for

Answer: six-legged creatures

what kind of creatures were the walk and run cycles for

Question: how many wings did a six-legged creature have

Answer: four

how many wings did a six-legged creature have

Question: where were the breathing holes located in the creatures

Answer: the trachea

where were the breathing holes located in the creatures

Question: how many legs did the creatures have

Answer: six

Question: what were some creatures designed to have in their trachea

Answer: special breathing holes

what were some creatures designed to have in their trachea

Question: what did the creatures have four wings to do

Answer: flying

what did the creatures have four wings to do

Much of the fauna and flora is bioluminescent , which is seen in creatures on Earth such as fireflies , many deep sea animals , and some microscopic algae .

The aforementioned breathing holes , located on multiple parts of a creature 's body other than the mouth , are similar to spiracles in some of Earth 's animals .

The science fiction blockbuster "Avatar" is set on a mysterious alien moon with out-of-this-world technologies. Its star director, James Cameron, has not only directed other science fiction epics like "Aliens, The Abyss" and the first two "Terminator" films, but was apparently the president of his high school science club, a physics major in college and has an engineer brother who has designed underwater robots.
So how much science is there in "Avatar"?
CAUTION: Possible spoilers ahead.
Pandora
The movie is set on the fictional Pandora, one of the many moons of a fictional Saturn-sized gas giant, Polyphemus, which is located in the real Alpha Centauri system, which at nearly 4.4 light-years away is the closest star system to Earth.
While astronomers have yet to discover moons beyond our solar system, they expect to. And the Alpha Centauri system could be a place worth looking. The larger of the two real, sunlike stars that make up this alien system, Alpha Centauri A, is the fictional Pandora's sun. In reality, scientists might soon be able to detect habitable moons with the James Webb Space Telescope and also study their atmospheres for key life-related gases such as oxygen, and water vapor.
Tropical rainforests cover most of Pandora's continents, which suggests its mother planet must be fairly close to its sun to take advantage of its light. A few years ago, this might have seemed implausible, but most of the alien planets scientists have discovered so far are in fact gas giants that are exceedingly close to their stars.
However, life on a gas giant's moon might present a host of challenges. Jupiter's moons exist within an intense radiation belt of electrons and ions trapped in the planet's magnetic field, and Saturn's gravitational pull leads to extraordinary tidal effects that may have once ripped apart nascent moons to produce its rings, and today can drive winds and volcanic eruptions on its moon Titan.
The draw that Pandora has for humans is a naturally occurring ore dubbed "unobtanium," an old in-joke in science fiction for materials with physically impossible qualities. (Technically, since it's a mineral, it might better be called "unobtainite," but that's a pretty nerdy quibble.) Unobtanium is the best superconductor known, and apparently works at room temperature. Just as real-world superconductors can float in the presence of a magnetic field, mountains on Pandora apparently loaded with unobtanium can float in the powerful magnetic pockets that dot the moon's surface. The films show these magnetic fields can interfere with technology, just as they would in real life — although, apparently, not whatever wireless links which allow the main characters to link with their "avatars."
High technology
The devices that give the film its name are avatars — artificial bodies the main characters operate wirelessly by thought alone. The bodies in question resemble the native blue-skinned humanoid race, the Na'vi, although they are hybrids that incorporate the DNA of their operators.
Building a body that weaves together human and alien DNA might be far-fetched. Even if aliens have DNA, humans would probably have more in common with corn or anything else on Earth than with life on Pandora. Still, scientists in real life are making advance after advance when it comes to brain-computer interfaces to control robot arms and type and speak through machines. Even without brain-computer interfaces, telepresence units are now allowing surgeons to perform life-saving operations from afar.
The humans also operate AMP suits, robotic exoskeletons that mimic their drivers' moves and give them incredible strength to handle giant cannons and fight dinosaur-sized aliens. The U.S. Army has been developing exoskeletons for years to amplify a soldier's strength using combustion engine-driven hydraulics that behave as artificial muscles.
The aliens
Life is often huge on Pandora, with giant dragon-like flying creatures, skyscraper-high trees, and the blue-skinned Na'vi, who grow some 10 feet tall. The gravity on Pandora is said to be lower than on Earth, which probably helps explain why everything is so outsized there, as they have less weight dragging them down.
Most of the animal life on Pandora is hexapodal — that is, six-limbed, for three pairs of either arms, legs or wings. One might expect six legs or more to be the norm on higher gravity worlds, to help them support their weight, but hexapods make up more than half of all known living creatures on Earth — the insects — so widespread hexapody falls within the realm of possibility.
The Na'vi are tetrapods, or four-limbed just like humans are, which at first makes them stick out like sore thumbs. Still, there are other tetrapods shown in the film — their flying mounts, the banshees or ikran, possess four wings as their limbs. This might intriguingly suggest the Na'vi are more closely related to these dragon-like animals than any of the land-dwellers shown in the film, although either Na'vi or banshees or both species might in fact come from a hexapodal lineage and merely shed two limbs, just as snakes got rid of their legs.
Apparently every living organism on Pandora is bioluminescent, meaning it can produce light. Bioluminescence is also seen on Earth, with fireflies and sea algae, among others. Many of the animals seem to possess two pairs of eyes — on Earth, insects not only have a pair of compound eyes, but a number of simple eyes as well.
The 'nostrils' of Pandoran animals are often located on their bodies instead of their faces, and they often have more than two. This suggests that instead of coupling the digestive and respiratory tracts together as humans and other tetrapods do — which can dangerously lead to choking — wildlife on Na'vi may separate these systems as insects do, which breath through holes dubbed spiracles.
The biggest stretch of the imagination when it comes to biology on Pandora might actually be the Na'vi. Barring their blue skin and tails, they look remarkably human, with four limbs, nostrils on their face, and an upright posture that might not be aptly suited for a life spent mostly in the trees. The females even have breasts, even though Cameron admits they aren't placental mammals, and we're extraordinarily lucky to find them when they are at a comparable level of intelligence as us — they might as easily fallen anywhere between animals barely capable of language to hyper-advanced cyborgs.
Still, one might forgive a little poetic license in a film that in other ways apparently tried hard to get the science right might.

Question: what are breathing holes in some of earths animals similar to

Answer: spiracles

what are breathing holes in some of earths animals similar to

Question: fireflies and algae are examples of what color

Answer: bioluminescent

fireflies and algae are examples of what color

Question: what is located on multiple parts of a creature's body other than the mouth

Answer: breathing holes

Question: what type of algae is bioluminescent

Answer: microscopic algae

Question: what is an example of a bioluminescent creature

Answer: fireflies

what is an example of a bioluminescent creature

Question: what kind of algae is bioluminescent

Answer: algae

Question: where are breathing holes located on a creature

Answer: the mouth

where are breathing holes located on a creature

Question: fireflies, deep sea animals, and microscopic algae are examples of what

Answer: creatures on Earth

List of fauna Direhorse ( Pa'li in Na'vi ) – The direhorse is a bioluminescent , hexapodal , superficially equine animal .

Dire Horse
|Common Name||Direhorse|
|Taxonomy||Equidirus hoplites or “feared armored horse”|
|Habitat||Rainforests and grasslands, but adaptable to most Pandoran environments. A grazing animal that has been domesticated by the Na’vi as a riding animal.|
|Anatomy||Horse-like creature with six legs, tough skin with no fur, long necks and small head, bold stripes, flexible carbon fiber armor over shoulders and along the back of the neck and head.|
|Feeding Ecology||Land omnivore that uses long snout to feed on sap. some protein intake through insects trapped in sap. Favored food is direhorse pitcher plant. Effective pollinator.|
|Size||Over 4.25 meters long, up to four meters in height|
|Notes||Animal has neural interface that allows Na'vi and direhorse to move together with apparent effortlessness. A highly intelligent, calm creature that, like the Na'vi, can turn fierce in the face of battle.|
Overview
The direhorse has two long, thin antennae that emerge from either side of the top of the skull. These appendages have feathery tips that move constantly, (almost like a kind of sea grass), and seek out the antennae of other direhorses as they move near. Xenobiologists believe that the touch of antennas is for pleasure and affection, but also a means of transferring information about food sources and potential dangers; herds often move in unison shortly after touching antennae.
The Na'vi are excellent riders and, with its six legs, the direhorse is a swift, nimble mount that is well-adapted to the rugged Pandoran terrain. Many direhorses are tamed to aid their riders in the hunt and in battle. To bond with (or, in human terms, to “break”) a direhorse, a Na'vi must mount the animal and connect their neural queue to the animal's antennae (or neural whip). Once queue and antenna touch, the feathery tendrils automatically intertwine, almost as if possessed of free will. Although the exact motive force remains unknown, it is believed that the antennae may secrete a pheromone that evokes the unique intertwining.
Once intertwined, the Na'vi rider can communicate motor commands instantly through the neural interface. The apparent lack of effort makes it seem as if the direhorse is an extension of the rider's own body. This frees up the Na'vi to use a bow and arrow during a hunt or battle.
Unlike the mountain banshee, however, the neural link made between rider and direhorse does not lead to a life-long, exclusive bond between Na'vi and animal; although Na'vi have their favorite mounts, it is possible and permissible to ride another clan member's direhorse.
The direhorse is a perfect mount to ride in the obstacle-strewn close quarters of a Pandoran forest; Direhorse can turn on a dime, have excellent reaction times, and can leap large distances.
When wild, the animals move together in a loose herd through the forests, feeding on tree bark and shrubs. Herds numbering in the dozens have been spotted from aircraft. But evidence (including scatological and plant impact) suggests that herds of more than one hundred animals are not uncommon.
The animals are easily startled, and, when all six legs are working in unison, can reach ninety-five kilometers per hour. The direhorse is larger by a third than the largest Terran draft horses such as the Clydesdale or the Percheron, and substantially larger than the biggest horse ever recorded on Earth.

Question: what type of animal is a direhorse

Answer: hexapodal

Question: what kind of animal is a direhorse

Answer: equine

Question: what is the name of the bioluminescent, hexapodal,

Answer: Direhorse

what is the name of the bioluminescent, hexapodal,

Question: what is the color of the direhorse

Answer: bioluminescent

Barlowe , who contributed to the banshee 's design , was influenced by manta rays and skates as well as relatively little - known pterosaurs and plesiosaurs that had " many , unique aerodynamic and hydrodynamic " characteristics .

Like the color scheme for the great leonopteryx , color schemes based on Earth animals were used for various banshees , though Page was inspired by Art Nouveau prints to warp the schemes so they would not look familiar to film audiences .

Great Leonopteryx ( Toruk in Na'vi , meaning last shadow ) – The great leonopteryx is the apex airborne predator native to Pandora .

(Read more)
The mountain banshee rookery is high in the Hallelujah Mountains. The largest rookery, which features the biggest specimens (and therefore the best to tame for riding), is in grottoes and outcrops on a sheer cliff face of Mons Veritatis, one of the largest of the floating mountains. It is here that the Na'vi come to select (and be selected by) a banshee for domestication. The bonded mountain banshees nest in the highest branches of Hometree, where they can be close at hand for their Na'vi rider.
The mountain banshee (like its smaller cousin, the forest banshee) is highly adapted for flight. Specially developed muscles attached to the breastbone allow for the powerful strokes needed to achieve lift. Xenobiologists continue to study the aerodynamics of the banshee. It is believed that all of Pandora's flying animals take advantage of gravity that is lower than Earth's and the increased air density, (which requires more force to displace with the downward/rearward stroke of their wings, and thus gives the animal's body more impetus with each flap). The downside is that the denser air is harder to move through, and requires highly-efficient streamlining to achieve high flight speeds.
Though reptilian in appearance, the banshee has a metabolism that is bird-like, and generates tremendous heat. The banshee has a complex cooling system to keep it from overheating during strenuous flying. The breathing system is central to this cooling. The air inlets, or spiracles, face forward at the front of the chest cavity, like the engine intakes of a jet fighter. Induction of air is controlled by a cartilaginous operculum, or flap-valve. The banshee lung is a bellows like structure, inflated by rib movement, but unlike the lungs of terrestrial animals, it has unidirectional flow, venting aft through gill-like slits.
Like many of Pandora's creatures, the banshee also has a remarkably strong cell structure. This structure, which is a biologically produced carbon-fiber, makes their bones much lighter and stronger than any organic Terran equivalent. This in turn allows them to generate more power and lift with every flap. The biochemistry of their muscle tissue allows them to generate nearly twice the force per pound of muscle as terrestrial flying animals such as bats and birds. This, again, generates tremendous metabolic heat. The hollow bones are connected to the bellows-like lung, and cooling air moves through the long bones of the fore and aft wings.
Each large fore-wing has three Primary Vanes at its tips. These form like the wings of a dragon fly, by the extrusion of a resin into the veins of a flexible membrane, which unfurls then cures in the sun into a rigid transparent vane. These vanes are replaced through molting. The purpose of the vanes is to generate lift and to provide fine control in flight. They are also quite robust structures designed to fold inward if the wingtips hit tree limbs or other obstacles.
The smaller hind wing, or canard, plays a dual role in Banshee flight. In level flight, when large amounts of power are not required, the creature propels itself with the fore-wing and uses the canard as a tail-plane, for steering. When more power is needed, for take-off and climbing, or escape from an aerial predator such as the leonopteryx, the canard becomes an additional wing, flapping to provide propulsion.
The steering vane under the banshee’s lower jaw and the featherlike fan at the tip of the tail provide additional turning authority for high performance aerobatics. The banshee is highly maneuverable and can dive at speeds close to 140 knots.
The banshee has two primary eyes which see in full color in roughly the same spectrum as human vision. Aft of the primary eyes are smaller secondary eyes, which can move independently or together with the primaries. They see in near infrared, for night hunting. They also are highly sensitive to motion, and act as an early warning system against attack from the rear. All four eyes are protected by lids and by transparent nictating membranes. Forward of the primary eyes are lines of sensor pits. These are thought to provide airflow information in flight, like a pitot tube on an airplane. Another hypothesis is that they are sensitive to sound, and have an echolocation role, by sensing the reflected sound of the banshee shrieks.
Banshees were so named because of their piercing signature cry. This is only one of the banshee’s many vocalizations, and is thought to be a distant call defining territory. Other vocalizations include a warning hiss, which is part of an overall threat display posture, and a short sharp shriek which denotes stress or fear. There are also warning sounds, and other stress vocalizations, as well as more guttural vocalizations associated with social grooming and contentment. The banshees are social animals, and communicate frequently, generating quite a din at rookeries and other communal areas.
The banshee emits sound from its head, using the open mouth to focus the direction. However, it does not have a trachea in its neck, since it breathes directly into the chest cavity. It has instead, a tube running from the lungs up into the head which pumps air through the vocal organ, the syrinx. Chambers in the head amplify the sound before it is emitted into the mouth cavity for directional aiming. Some banshee vocalizations are emitted directly from the resonating cavity, when the mouth is closed.
The mountain banshee (like its smaller cousin, the forest banshee) is highly adapted for flight. Specially developed muscles attached to the breastbone allow for the powerful strokes needed to achieve lift. Xenobiologists continue to study the aerodynamics of the banshee. It is believed that all of Pandora's flying animals take advantage of gravity that is lower than Earth's and the increased air density, (which requires more force to displace with the downward/rearward stroke of their wings, and thus gives the animal's body more impetus with each flap). The downside is that the denser air is harder to move through, and requires highly-efficient streamlining to achieve high flight speeds.
Though reptilian in appearance, the banshee has a metabolism that is bird-like, and generates tremendous heat. The banshee has a complex cooling system to keep it from overheating during strenuous flying. The breathing system is central to this cooling. The air inlets, or spiracles, face forward at the front of the chest cavity, like the engine intakes of a jet fighter. Induction of air is controlled by a cartilaginous operculum, or flap-valve. The banshee lung is a bellows like structure, inflated by rib movement, but unlike the lungs of terrestrial animals, it has unidirectional flow, venting aft through gill-like slits.
Like many of Pandora's creatures, the banshee also has a remarkably strong cell structure. This structure, which is a biologically produced carbon-fiber, makes their bones much lighter and stronger than any organic Terran equivalent. This in turn allows them to generate more power and lift with every flap. The biochemistry of their muscle tissue allows them to generate nearly twice the force per pound of muscle as terrestrial flying animals such as bats and birds. This, again, generates tremendous metabolic heat. The hollow bones are connected to the bellows-like lung, and cooling air moves through the long bones of the fore and aft wings.
Each large fore-wing has three Primary Vanes at its tips. These form like the wings of a dragon fly, by the extrusion of a resin into the veins of a flexible membrane, which unfurls then cures in the sun into a rigid transparent vane. These vanes are replaced through molting. The purpose of the vanes is to generate lift and to provide fine control in flight. They are also quite robust structures designed to fold inward if the wingtips hit tree limbs or other obstacles.
The smaller hind wing, or canard, plays a dual role in Banshee flight. In level flight, when large amounts of power are not required, the creature propels itself with the fore-wing and uses the canard as a tail-plane, for steering. When more power is needed, for take-off and climbing, or escape from an aerial predator such as the leonopteryx, the canard becomes an additional wing, flapping to provide propulsion.
The steering vane under the banshee’s lower jaw and the featherlike fan at the tip of the tail provide additional turning authority for high performance aerobatics. The banshee is highly maneuverable and can dive at speeds close to 140 knots.
The banshee has two primary eyes which see in full color in roughly the same spectrum as human vision. Aft of the primary eyes are smaller secondary eyes, which can move independently or together with the primaries. They see in near infrared, for night hunting. They also are highly sensitive to motion, and act as an early warning system against attack from the rear. All four eyes are protected by lids and by transparent nictating membranes. Forward of the primary eyes are lines of sensor pits. These are thought to provide airflow information in flight, like a pitot tube on an airplane. Another hypothesis is that they are sensitive to sound, and have an echolocation role, by sensing the reflected sound of the banshee shrieks.
Banshees were so named because of their piercing signature cry. This is only one of the banshee’s many vocalizations, and is thought to be a distant call defining territory. Other vocalizations include a warning hiss, which is part of an overall threat display posture, and a short sharp shriek which denotes stress or fear. There are also warning sounds, and other stress vocalizations, as well as more guttural vocalizations associated with social grooming and contentment. The banshees are social animals, and communicate frequently, generating quite a din at rookeries and other communal areas.
The banshee emits sound from its head, using the open mouth to focus the direction. However, it does not have a trachea in its neck, since it breathes directly into the chest cavity. It has instead, a tube running from the lungs up into the head which pumps air through the vocal organ, the syrinx. Chambers in the head amplify the sound before it is emitted into the mouth cavity for directional aiming. Some banshee vocalizations are emitted directly from the resonating cavity, when the mouth is closed.

Question: what type of prints were used to create the color scheme for banshees

Answer: Art Nouveau

Question: what were the color schemes for the banshees based on

Answer: Earth animals

what were the color schemes for the banshees based on

Question: who did the color scheme for the banshee

Answer: Barlowe

who did the color scheme for the banshee

Question: what was page's inspiration for the color scheme for the banshees

Answer: Art Nouveau prints

what was page's inspiration for the color scheme for the banshees

Question: where is the great leonopteryx native to

Answer: Pandora

where is the great leonopteryx native to

Question: what was barlowe's inspiration for the color scheme

Answer: manta rays and skates

what was barlowe's inspiration for the color scheme

Question: what dinosaurs had unique aerodynamic and hydrodynamic characteristics

Answer: pterosaurs and plesiosaurs

Question: what type of rays did barlowe use to create the color scheme

Answer: manta rays

what type of rays did barlowe use to create the color scheme

They have lateral skin membranes on each side of the body.

They have large eyes and grow 1.5 meters tall.

They have lateral skin membranes on each side of the body .

They have large eyes and grow 1.5 meters tall .

Thanator ( Palulukan in Na'vi ) – The thanator is a large hexapodal land predator that is believed , by the RDA , to be the apex land predator .

Thanator
|Common Name||Thanator|
|Na'vi Name||Palulukan or “Dry Mouth Bringer of Fear”|
|Taxonomy||Bestiapanthera ferox or “fierce panther beast”|
|Habitat||Rainforest floor. Similar species have been observed in subarctic regions.|
|Anatomy||Armored head and massive distensible armored jaw. Teeth are twenty-three centimeters long. Burnished black skin banded with stripes of yellow and scarlet. Ten external sensory quills. Upper lips fold back for maximum tooth extension. Armored chitinous plating over dorsal area.|
|Feeding Ecology||Apex land predator, omnivore with preference for nocturnal hunting|
|Size||Reaches more than 5.5. meters long, up to 2.5 meters tall|
|Notes||The most fearsome of all Pandoran land predators. Wide, armored tail can slam prey or defend against other thanators. Cartilaginous plates around its neck that can flare, possibly as a threat display but more likely as an echolocation or other sensory pinpointing system. Given its anatomy, it is likely that thanator is evolutionary relative to the viperwolf.|
Overview
Although many regions of the moon have yet to be explored, xenobiologists currently believe that the thanator may be the apex land predator on Pandora. Reminiscent of a Terran panther, this enormous, powerful animal is unique in its ability to lord over its territory and strike fear into the largest and fiercest of Pandora's creatures. Even the Na'vi, who are renowned for their courage, are shaken by the approach of the creature; it is not celebrated in dance or song.
Its musculature is pronounced and impressive, providing power for protracted runs and leaps. The speed of its neck and jaw strike is as swift as a camera shutter. In addition to conventional ripping and tearing, the thanator can also deliver a lethal blow from its armored tail. The thanator's senses are so highly developed that, depending on atmospheric conditions, it can detect prey up to thirteen kilometers away.
The thanator appears to hunt alone and normally does not stray outside of its territory, which is believed to be roughly 300 square kilometers. It appears to hunt mainly at night, although seems to make an exception if hungry enough.
Surprisingly, the thanator has ten sensory quills, two each sprouting from armor plating that encircles the rear of the skull. The function of the quills is poorly understood, but it has been hypothesized that they may be tied to an internal mechanism of prey location.

Question: how tall are the thanator

Answer: 1.5 meters

Question: what is the name of the hexapodal land predator

Answer: Thanator

what is the name of the hexapodal land predator

Question: how many meters tall are the thanator

Answer: 1.5

Question: what type of skin membranes does the thanator have on each side of its body

Answer: lateral

Question: what type of membranes does the thanator have on each side of its body

Answer: lateral skin membranes

Question: what type of land predator is thanator

Answer: hexapodal

Question: who believes the thanator is the apex land predator

Answer: the RDA

who believes the thanator is the apex land predator

They are zooplantae, part animal, part plant.

They are zooplantae , part animal , part plant .

They are first seen when Jake wanders off into a forest of Helicoradia and touches multiple leaves , at which they retract and coil up to reveal a hammerhead titanothere behind .

So people talk a lot about how insanely detailed this world is. But really, how detailed is it?
Says designer Yuri Bartoli:
Jim has always talked about a fractal layer of detail, where as you get closer to the world of Pandora, more and more levels of intricacy emerge to create a sense of reality. Just as in nature, there is always more structure than your eye can perceive. The color passes on the Banshee alone took me several weeks to complete, since including the necessary detail required multiple paintings 190 megapixels in size, as well as mapping them on the 3-D model to judge how these markings would look from the camera when wrapped around the creature.
Bartoli adds that when all of this work came together in the finished film, it became more than the sum of its parts. "The fact that so many people seem to genuinely respond to our work, and appreciate the ideas and subtexts, is a great reward for all the work we did putting fine detail into creating the movie."
Were there any creatures or designs that didn't make it into the final movie?
According to Bartoli, the process of creating Pandora's wildlife went down a few "blind alleys," just like evolution on Earth. The designers tried to create a "wide field of ideas" so they could find the ones which worked well together as an ecosystem. "Parameters such as six legs, an extra passive eye, four digits, threat displays, decoupled breath intakes, body markings, etc. emerged or had already been laid out in the script. So as you can imagine there are a lot of ideas that either weren't right for this aesthetic or were held back due to the limitations of telling the story- suffice to say Pandora has many more creatures in it than you see on screen."
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What were some of these creatures?
According to Tully Summers, there was a fishing scene between Jake and Neytiri, featuring alien fish, that got cut. Also, a "tribal initiation" sequence where Jake is stung by a nasty insect on purpose — but you can see that insect crawling in the foreground in one shot. There was also a sequence where "sting bats" attack the human compound — and you can see some sting bats flying in formation next to one of the Samson helicopters. (The "sting bats" started out swan-like, but Weta made them more fearsome and batlike.) Summers also worked on the Sturmbeest, a kind of bison-like creature that didn't make the cut.
Why do all the flying vehicles have propellers?
According to vehicle designer Paul Ozzimo, who worked with TyRuben Ellingson (whom we already interviewed a while back), the designers suggested putting jets onto the Samson and Dragon flying vehicles, instead of propellers. But Cameron nixed the idea. "He said no, propellers are still very efficient. It was really a shock to me that these vehicles didn't have jet engines on them," recalls Ozzimo. But Cameron insisited that in the future, there will be super-efficient propellers. "I really do think it makes for a much more believable vehicle, the propeller idea, because with a jet you don't really get to see a moving part. You just see a tube, and a flame coming out or whatever. It's kind of boring." Also, Ozzimo says he feels like the propellers add a much-needed vulnerability to these craft, which need to be powerful and imposing, but also get "taken down" by the Na'Vi at the end. "That was a typical Jim stroke of genius, to put propellers on these things."
Some people have suggested that Pandora is a post-singularity world, because the worldmind is like a giant computer that everyone plugs into. Was this something anyone discussed during production?
The fact that the planet is a big brain and has synapses that can talk to everyone is "an important part of thinking about the planet," says Stromberg. "We always approach the world as essentially a big brain," he adds. "That was always there." But the singularity theory is just one possible explanation, he believes. You could see it as "the next stage of evolution," or fit it into various religious frameworks. But the intent was to "create something that gave us all hope, really, and gave us all a sense, or at least a metaphor for being one and protecting each other, and what we stand on."
It seems like the ISV VentureStar, the ship Jake arrives on, cannot travel faster than light. So how does it travel?
According to Ben Procter, James Cameron wrote a ten-page document addressing this very question, "which became my bible as I led a team of talented 3D designers (Tex Kadonaga, Joe Hiura, and Rob Johnson) in the development of the exterior design." The document includes sketches, as well as entire section on the ship's propulsion technology, which uses matter/antimatter reaction, complete with speed and trip duration calculations. There's also "a wealth of information on the ship's components and their relative layout."
Adds Procter:
The huge glowing radiators mounted to the engines dissipate their heat, and the enormously long central truss, with its own protective coolers and reflectors, protects the cargo and crew modules from the engines' heat and radiation using the simple rule of r-squared attenuation rather than heavy shielding. (Yes, Jim really thinks about this kind of stuff and explains it very clearly in text and in person.) The ship has a pair of centrifugal-gravity-gen modules for the crew who remain awake for the duration, which has become a pretty typical feature of quasi-realistic ship designs in movies. But one unique feature it has which directly relates to the sub-light realistic travel is a cascade-style shield stack to protect the speeding craft from interstallar debris. Jim's doc completely explains this technology, apparently based on current NASA research, and how it obliterates potentially catastrophic particles by letting them slam through a series of thin, light shield surfaces.
To make a long story short, the VStar is definitely not your typical movie ship and it's all due to Jim's engineering knowledge and passion. It was a privilege to work on this design that he'd clearly invested so much thought into.
Just how complex is the Na'Vi religion?
Leri Greer at Weta Workshop spent a lot of time thinking about the complexities of Na'Vi religion in the process of devising a lot of tribal artifacts. Greer, John Harding and production designer Rick Carter, decided that there was a kind of "natural math" in some of the lines on the Na'Vi designs, like the lines radiating outwards across a spiral shape, in when you look at a pinecone from below. The Weta crew decided there were variations in the way each Na'Vi tribe worshipped Eywa, and very different family structures. This was all part of a huge "Pandora-pedia" that Weta workshop created internally, which they ran past the production office.
The Na'Vi are warriors and stuff. So do the different Na'Vi tribes go to war against each other pretty often?
Greer considered this question in depth, in the process of creating Na'Vi warpaint and war gear. He decided that the Na'Vi don't have wars any more. But they "do put a lot of effort into numerous annual gatherings where they "compete" for their specific tribe's honor and pride in various skills based competitions. I saw these kind of gatherings as the pivotal interaction, on a worldwide basis, between the various tribes." And they are pretty good at killing each other, when the need arises. (But this was something Greer developed internally at Weta, so it's not gospel.)
Some of the designers who worked on this film also worked on the various Star Treks, including production designer Robert Stromberg. how is creating James Cameron's universe different from working on the Trek universe?
Stromberg won two Emmy Awards for his work on Trek. "I ended up creating just about every city in the television series," Stromberg says. He was working for a compnay called Illusion Arts, and every week a call would come for his company to create a Vulcan city or a Romulan city, "and it just became so normal to be doing that." But Stromberg felt strongly that he didn't want Avatar to be influenced by the Trek aesthetic: "I was really looking for something more original, something that hadn't been done before. Because I had been privy to how the Star Trek worlds had been created, I tried to use the technology and the methodology, but steer away from it creatively."
He adds:
One way that it is very different is that in Avatar, Jim is very science-based and very physics-based. So everything is not only plausible but you could build things and they would actually work. Jim is just very much into the reality of things, whereas in Star Trek, you could push the limits of plausibility. Even the hometree on Pandora was very specifically tested and computer-modeled so that the base of it would support a tree of that height... the design of it was grounded in physics. Whereas on Star Trek, you would do something that looked cool, whether physics were involved or not.
Why don't any of the creatures on Pandora have hair, apart from the Na'Vi themselves?
Creature designer Tully Summers says the lack of hair is meant to "accentuate the creatures' other-worldliness. Putting fur on our mammal equivalents would have been redundant and too obvious." Adds creature designer Wayne Barlowe:
From the inception of the "black-ops" design phase back in '05, Jim was interested in exploring vivid markings and almost amphibian-like body textures. Poison-dart frogs were mentioned as possible inspirations for the look he was seeking. The solutions we began to play around with all encompassed those early concepts. While the vibrant color schemes of the terrestrial creatures fell by the wayside, the unique body-textures were retained. Obviously, the aerial fauna remains intensely colorful. These were, I believe, choices Jim made answering his inner, artistic muse.
Why does the "Avatar chamber" that Jake Sully slides inside look like an MRI machine?
According to designer Yuri Bartoli, whose early sketches are remarkably close to the final product, the resemblance to an MRI is intentional. The big "ring" that the coffin slides inside spins around really quickly, to capture views of your brain within an intense magnetic field. But it has to be a two-way system, of course: as the coffin slides inside the field the ring generates, it becomes part of a feedback system, reading the occupant's brain and feeding back sensory impressions from the Avatar.
Does Jake Sully's Avatar bed do something to keep his body from atrophying?
Apparently not, but the designers considered having Jake suspended in some kind of fluid or on top of gel, that would allow for blood circulation while the Avatar "driver" is immobile for long periods of time, says Bartoli. "Design-wise we always tried to strike a balance between having the technology look functional and cool at the same time."
Jake's tribe is called the Omaticaya. What does that mean, exactly?
Apparently it refers to a particular type of flute-like instrument this tribe makes music with. (The one that that woman is good at playing, whom Neytiri tries to fix Jake up with.)
So why are Pandora's trees green like Earth trees, when everything else is so weirdly colored?
As we mentioned in our previous design feature, there was a huge push among some of the designers to make the foliage of Pandora cyan-colored instead of green. This turned out to be a problem because of creating depth perception, but also Stromberg opposed it — it would have made the "atmospheric haze" harder see because it was also cyan. But also it would have been too much. "We had to have something that the average person could grab onto as a comfort level, so we could capture them, and slowly introduce these things and not hit them over the head with the clown hammer."
What was the inspiration for those weird trumpet-like flowers, that collapse when Jake touches them?
Craig Shoji says those were based on "Christmas-tree worms," that you find attached to a reef underwater. They behave like that, and it's incredibly cool if you ever get to touch one.
When Jake wakes up from cryo sleep, he's in a huge, wide open chamber. What's the rationale behind having such a cavernous area on a ship that has to travel light years from Earth?
Procter says this is one area where Cameron's legendary dedication to having designs be "real and functional" gave way to the need for something to look cool. "While it's true you wouldn't want to drag around that much architecture at near light speed, the space needed to serve certain narrative functions," he explains.
Adds Procter:
Jim was very clear that he didn't want to reveal the Pandora arrival in the usual way - the wide establishing shot of the ship sailing toward the planet. He and Rick Carter, the production designer, had a very specific vision for how to cut straight from the scene where Jake's brother is cremated to Jake's claustrophobic wake-up in his cryo unit. The coffin resonances are clear here, but for the real "you're not in Kansas any more, Jake" feel, you had to really emphasize the wow factor and zero-g of the space, and there's no better way to do this than give it a scale where you can see a whole ballet of zero-g ambulation going on. Remember also that in the script we spend a considerable amount of screen time seeing Jake rolling around in his wheelchair on earth, so part of the cryo reveal is that we now suddenly see Jake floating around as freely as anyone else - clearly Jake's arrival on Pandora is a new beginning with new potential.
In designing the final version of the cryovault, my personal goal was to completely avoid any "floors" or "beds" which would give a sense of gravitational orientation. The reason I stuck two people in each unit, facing opposite ways, was so that gravity was immediately denied at the most basic level. The lockers are placed for good line of sight and access for the cryo unit occupants, but this actually orients them counterintuitively (perpendicular) to the space's main walls. I also did study cameras and animations which had the view continuously rolling and adopting new orientations, and I was very gratified to see some of this in the final film.
The Na'Vi look like a lot of different native peoples on Earth, with their warpaint and their weapons and so on. Were they actually based on Earth tribes?
Designer Craig Shoji says he and other designers used a lot of different real-life items:
Inspiration came from many sources, but a lot involved looking at current indigenous people of the world including those inhabiting the rain forest like the Penan tribe, and the Kayapo and Yanomami indians. Also the different tribes in Africa like the Himba, Masai, and Samburu. As well as all the different forms of face and body painting that took place in all the different tribal settings. There were thousands upon thousands upon hundreds upon millions upon mucho reference pictures that we were collecting and looking at. It became sort of an obsession for Seth and myself to constantly have our 'Na'vi-esque' radar on so whenever we saw something we'd automatically buy it, save-as, or take a picture to add to the collection. It varied from those woven toy finger traps found in Chinatown, to images of Lee Bontecou's amazing sculptural work. We'd then analyze it to try and break down what was working and what we liked. Was it aesthetic? The material? The simple, yet sophisticated mechanism in how it worked? And then we'd riff on those concepts to create designs that would live in the Na'vi world.
Is the Hammerhead, the creature that first threatens Jake Sully, based on a shark?
Originally, the Hammerhead just had to be a huge creature, big enough that even a Thanator would think twice about attacking one, says Yuri Bartoli. But James Cameron came up with the idea of basing this creature on hammerhead sharks on Earth. That huge bony protrusion has two purposes: It's good for attacking, obviously, but it's probably also useful for mating displays, much the same way that rams smash their horns together to attract a female.
But why does the Hammerhead, with its big grey hammer, display such bright plumage in its "threat display?"
According to Bartoli, originally the brightly colored "threat display" and the "hammer" were going to be the same thing. The hammer would have been brightly colored. But the designers decided it was better to break this up, and "create a more delicate structure that would splay out. A threat display is meant to be seen, so it required bright colors that would stand out against it's more muted body." Adds Bartoli, many creatures on Pandora have a "threat display" mode:
The Hexapede similarly has a threat display that it also uses like a satellite dish to pinpoint the sound of approaching hunters. The Thanator as well has skin flaps that flare out, but over time this has evolved into joining with its antennae. We always tried to have a method to our madness, and very often by trying to be consistent this led us to new design ideas we wouldn't have come up with by pulling it out of thin air.
Okay, sure. But not all of the creatures on Pandora have "threat displays" or display bright colors. Some of them do have camouflage. How do you decide which is which?
According to creature designer Tully Summers, it really depended on how the creature functioned within its environment, as well as how the real-world counterpart lives. The Thanator is based on a huge panther, the banshees are predatory birds, and the viper-wolves are wolves (obviously). Explains Summers:
The overall colors were driven by what roll the creature played in the eco system. Viper wolves are nocturnal pack hunters, and the Titanothere a panther-like stalker, both hunting below the gloomy canopy of Pandora's jungle. It made sense for them to have darker color schemes. The Banshees roost in floating mountains and hunt in the sky, a much brighter environment. Even their colorful skin could be considered camouflage when seen against the vibrant alien jungle. Their undersides are lighter, making them harder to see from below.
So the banshees, the dragons that the Na'Vi ride on, look like lizards, except for their eyes and jaws, which are fish-like. What's with the the fish face?
Bartoli explains that James Cameron was very specific about the kinds of motions he wanted the banshees to be able to do. They had to be able to open their jaws very wide, with rows of teeth that "would distend and actually rack forward." There aren't any lizard jaws that can do that, but the mechanics of fish jaws worked perfectly for this design challenge, says Bartoli. "It also got us away from it looking like a lizard and became something unique to itself."
Given that Pandora is actually a habitable moon, orbiting a huge planet, how does that affect the day/night cycle?
The ever-reliably nerdy boffins at Weta Workshop gave a lot of thought to this in the process of designing artifacts, says Greer.
I actually wrote about how it causes a particular sky coloration across the visible spectrum at moments of pure dusk. And the Na'vi, depending on what elevation they live at (sea level versus higher altitudes), perceive a distinct color in narrow band at the horizon at that moment. They identify themselves, and signify in their markings, with this color. Which helps other Na'vi quickly discern at a distance what/where they are from, or what they are likely to be like (fishermen, high plains, skyriders, etc..). That pure dusk "color," combined with their other predominant color markings lets you also know how they relate to eywa as a "religion" versus eywa as a physical reality. And during cermonial gatherings you can "read" a Na'vi by how they mark themselves with dyes, muds, and paints. And the environment and day/night cycle is directly responsible for the development of this social expression behavior. Again, this was an internal idea to help us design things at Weta Workshop, it's hard to say how much filtered upward to the larger production.
What's the design inspiration for the Tree Of Souls? Is it based on a particular type of tree on Earth?
Actually, the Tree Of Souls was originally going to look like a willow tree, with hanging leaves, says Craig Shoji. But at some point, Cameron decided it should have tendrils instead. Cameron wanted it to be white during the day and glow pink at night. The tendrils are supposed to resemble the tentacles of various sea creatures, including anemones and various starfish. Also the cilia that embrace the people as Moat prays over them are supposed to be like an umbilical cord, connecting people to the mother/planet. The ethereal effect of the Tree Of Souls, says Shji, comes from "the bio luminescent color, the slow swaying of the tendrils (as if they were under water), and the fact that it was a familiar shape (tree) with unfamiliar details (tendrils)."
Is the hair-braid thing supposed to look like an ethernet cable or what?
It's definitely meant to go straight into the brain, says Shoji, and it's like jacking into a network. The braided hair is like a protective cover for this brain-link. Adds Shoji:
I do remember that Jim had a solid idea for what he wanted when the queues connected, and he would do this specific motion with his hands. Picture holding your hands out so your fingers were pointing at each other, then moving your hands closer and beginning to wiggle your fingers, then when your fingers meet, start interlocking your fingers and twisting your wrists so your hands are locked. So the concepts for that came from referencing a lot of different types of cilia and microscopic photos of hair, bugs, plants, etc. It resulted in a very purpose driven cilia for connecting to the Pandoran world. Simple, yet kinda creepy.
Were the creatures on Pandora supposed to be cute? How do you negotiate the cute/scary divide?
The only cute creatures on Pandora were supposed to be the baby viper-wolves, which were designed by Stan Winston Studios, according to Tully Summers. Everything else is supposed to look like it can eat you.
The Direhorse looks sort of like a six-legged horse, but it also has ridges and is vaguely dinosaur-like. What's the inspiration behind a six-legged dinosaur horse?
Wayne Barlowe says that Cameron's script called for a six-legged horse substitute, which the audience would instantly "read" as "horse." The six legs were a huge factor in "de-emphasizing the equine sillhouette." Barlowe's earliest designs were more alien-looking, but then it lost the crucial "horse" factor. Says Barlowe:
There was some concern as to the bio-mechanics of the six legs but my guess was that if they were grouped four towards the front and two in the rear locomotion issues would be solved. Those worries were pretty much put to rest after some informative motion tests were run. Not so sure I would call the Direhorse saurian, though. My influence in the head was clearly a giant anteater, but in my drawings I used more abstract lines to deconstruct the familiar mammals' lines. The mane was a conscious effort to retain the look of a clipped or short mane — an echo of the erect manes on Przewalski's horses or zebras melded to a cetacean fin - while creating an iconic line. And, the cuticle-like armor simply made sense as an evolutionary answer to moving through potentially dangerous underbrush and ever-present viperwolves.
So the Na'Vi are hunters but they don't kill too many animals. What's their main food source?
According to designer Craig Shoji, the Na'Vi's main protein source is "teylu grubs." He worked on a deleted scene showing Na'Vi food-sharing and drinking rituals, and designed some of their housewares.

Question: what kind of plant are the zooplantae

Answer: zooplantae

Question: where do the zooplantae first appear

Answer: Helicoradia

Question: what are the names of the zooplantae

Answer: Jake

Question: what type of animal is the zooplantae

Answer: hammerhead titanothere

Question: what type of plant are zooplantae

Answer: plant

Question: what type of animal is behind the zooplantae

Answer: a hammerhead titanothere

what type of animal is behind the zooplantae