Avatar (2009 film) before it can reach the Tree of Souls; Quaritch, wearing an AMP suit, escapes from his own damaged aircraft and breaks open the avatar link unit containing Jake's human body, exposing it to Pandora's poisonous atmosphere. Quaritch prepares to slit the throat of Jake's avatar, but Neytiri kills Quaritch and saves Jake from suffocation. With the exceptions of Jake, Norm and a select few others, all humans are expelled from Pandora and sent back to Earth, after which Jake is permanently transferred into his avatar with the aid of the Tree of Souls. In 1994, director James Cameron wrote an
Avatar (2009 film) said he had been "surprised at how much it did look like ". Principal photography for "Avatar" began in in Los Angeles and Wellington, New Zealand. Cameron described the film as a hybrid with a full live-action shoot in combination with computer-generated characters and live environments. "Ideally at the end of the day the audience has no idea which they're looking at," Cameron said. The director indicated that he had already worked four months on nonprincipal scenes for the film. The live action was shot with a modified version of the proprietary digital 3-D Fusion Camera System, developed by Cameron