ABSTRACT:
In “My Journey Through Pandora”, we follow in VFX Supervisor Pavani Rao Boddapati’s footsteps, working at Wētā FX on three Avatar movies and on the Avatar ride at Disney World Florida.
Beginning with Avatar, which brought her to New Zealand, we follow her personal growth and professional career over 18 years at Wētā FX. Starting as a Lighting Technical Director, and progressing to VFX Supervisor, she spent a decade of that time bringing James Cameron’s world of Pandora to life.
Pavani will share her experience adapting to the Wētā FX pipeline when she first arrived. She will talk about how she then contributed to the development of that pipeline as she worked her way through a variety of roles. Ultimately, she was in a position where she could be instrumental in the design of the award-winning water FX pipeline for the Avatar sequels.
She will share the challenges that her team faced and conquered, and how that led to the groundbreaking production FX that she supervised on Avatar: The Way of Water and Avatar: Fire and Ash.
BIO:
Pavani Rao Boddapati is a Visual Effects Supervisor at Wētā FX, most recently on Avatar: Fire and Ash and Avatar: The Way of Water, each of which won an Academy Award® and a BAFTA for Best Visual Effects.
She has spent a decade in Pandora, having worked on all three Avatar movies and the Avatar ride. She enjoys working on projects with major research and development components. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
She began her VFX career at Rhythm and Hues in Los Angeles, where she contributed to the lighting for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, and look development for The Golden Compass.
Pavani moved to New Zealand to join Wētā FX as a Lighting Technical Director on Avatar. She transitioned to Lead Lighting Technical Director on Rise of the Planet of the Apes and then to CG Supervisor on Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy. Drawing on her architectural background, she led the team in building and later damaging the post-apocalyptic CG world in Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials.
She returned to Pandora as CG Supervisor on Avatar: Flight of Passage, a 3D flying-simulator ride for Disney’s Animal Kingdom Park. She led the team in designing a bespoke pipeline to deliver every frame of the ride’s fully immersive Pandora environment, rendered in stereo at 10K 60FPS.
Pavani has been leading the development of Wētā FX’s next generation water pipeline, starting her work on the underwater sequence on Alita: Battle Angel which implemented new technology for coupled hair and water simulations. Following this, she supervised the Water Task Force; a cross-functional team of artists and researchers who developed a new water pipeline capable of photorealistic water for any conceivable requirement. This significant work led to her role as VFX Supervisor on the Avatar sequels.