Avatar costume designer Deborah L. Scott on creating costumes for CGI: “I started off dropping things in a fishtank”

How does one costume design in CGI? That was the million dollar question for longtime James Cameron collaborator and Avatar (2009), Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) and Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025) costume designer Deborah L. Scott, who first worked with Cameron on the period epic Titanic (1997), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design. 

Cut to pre-production on the first Avatar film, which came out in 2009. While Cameron had been toiling away on the project for decades, Scott initially wasn’t able to work on it due to other commitments. However, a shift in her schedule saw her making the trek to New Zealand, where the Avatar films have been shot and digitally enhanced with CGI.

Initially, Scott described her initiation to the world of Pandora as “mind boggling, because I didn’t know much about [the technology]. I couldn’t even turn on a computer. I’ve become a lot more educated in the process. That was the gem of it all was to get that education. I had very good teachers [at Wētā FX, the visual effects team that does Avatar’s animation].”

But because Cameron and producer Jon Landau knew that the digital artists would get better results with physical costumes as reference points, Scott soon understood that it was her hands-on training and experience in costume design that would lend itself to the impressively realistic CGI that Avatar has become known for. “I work in a hands-on world. The technology itself is not something I have to react to.”

However, the costumes of the Na’vi, the Indigenous people who occupy Pandora, as well as the different clans, such as the Omatikaya (Avatar), Metkayina (The Way of Water), Tlalim and Mangkwan (Fire and Ash), weren’t without their challenges. Scott and her team conducted many tests to figure out how they would fit the Na’vi’s bodies, which are larger than those of the human actors portraying them in motion capture and therefore had to be scaled up in post-production. There was also the issue of how the costumes would move in different environments.  

“We would put all this stuff together, go to a pool and film,” Scott says. “They were some of the funnest times!”

Here, Scott talks through her research and design processes and whether AI could ever replace her job. 

Scarlett Harris: Walk us through the process of designing the costumes and then having them committed to CGI through performance capture.

Deborah L. Scott: This might take a few hours! It’s a very complicated process, but it blends the best of both worlds. I come from live action and making costumes; that’s familiar territory to me. These films are a whole new ball game and a new design avenue that I’d never experienced before. 

It was incredibly challenging to get the designs down first [while also] developing the process of how we were going to make things and the materials we were going to use. During performance capture, which was 18 months, the actors were all wearing marker suits and head rigs. I used reference costumes for motion and movement. Sometimes an actor will put on a real garment [to understand the] interaction between their movements and the costumes. It’s pretty easy for them to forget that their knife is on their left hip and they reach for their right hip.

For The Way of Water, we spent a long time developing the underwater performance capture suits, which had never been done before. It took about eight months to actually get underwater and have it be successful.

[Cameron and Landau] wanted everything made because they know that’s the best way to get results and for the digital artists to understand the costumes, including motion tests, water tests, wet-to-dry, how the hair moves. It’s a massive amount of scientific tests, because [Cameron] is not only a creative genius; he’s also a scientist. There’s a lot of proof of concept that goes on.

You’re not 100% sure [it’s going to work] until you see it on camera. During that time, you have time to redesign, change the colour, etc.

Once we finish a garment, we start over [digitally], giving the visual effects team a very detailed packet that consists of samples, data, photos, proportions – because we fit the costume to a human, but [it has to be portrayed] on a Na’vi-sized body. I’ve designed it in the real world, and then I’m going to design it in the virtual world. Interestingly, that has become an equal amount of work for me. 

Working on the Avatar films, as opposed to a live-action film, you design the costume and then get to see it on the performer, but then also have the chance to keep designing while you’re watching the performances come together. 

How did you ensure that the costumes were accurately portrayed in The Way of Water, which, as you said, was the first time that had been done?

Having an incredible amount of time to do these investigations, we were well armed. I started off dropping things like hair or a leaf in a fishtank to see how an article takes on water – does it move, does it suck it up, does it sink, does it float?

There was a lot of experimentation around what materials to use. If I need it to be a little heavier, do I increase the density of the fabric, do I add beads to it? And you have to make sure the costume stays on the body. The bottoms were easy, because the tail helps secure it, but the tops were a little trickier on the women because of their breasts, and you’re working with Indigenous peoples that don’t necessarily need to cover up everything, but when you’re [making a 12A movie] that’s kind of a given.

We were working with natural fibres for the most part. And if it couldn’t be natural, you can make an artificial thing that looks natural. And I had the license of being on Pandora and being able to do whatever I wanted!

Let’s talk about the different clans in Pandora. Did you draw from any real life Indigenous groups for their costumes?

100%. The research was almost exclusively real world. We looked around the entire world to see what the people here are doing for body art, how do they wear their hair, how much do they cover themselves up depending on the climate, what materials do they make their clothing out of? [Cameron] knew that [he wanted to draw from] greater Polynesia for the Metkayina clan, which is a massive amount of islands and peoples. It’s really complicated, so it’s a bonus of the job to get to do all that research and learn about different people, plants, fibres, roots, flowers and beetles all over the world.

I work a lot with colour palette, so you can see there’s a stark difference [between each clan].

Delving into the Windtraders and the Ash people, it was very clear that they were completely different [to the Omatikaya and Metkayina clans]. The Windtraders fly around. They go from clan to clan, all over Pandora. We don’t even know how many clans there are – we’ve only visited two places so far! So it opens up all these different avenues for exploration. So we work hand in hand with the production designers to understand what they’re doing.

The Ash were an interesting challenge because their society is so desolate. They got designed and redesigned a few times. It was about evolving the nature of how that clan lives. Oona Chaplin’s performance as Varang was so informative to some of the changes I made in her designs. That’s what I mean about watching a performance [in live action], and then I get to go back and embellish [in CGI].

James Cameron is vocally anti-AI, but are you worried about how AI will encroach on your field?

I don’t use it. Not that I wouldn’t, because we all need to embrace new technologies as they come along – if we hadn’t, Avatar wouldn’t be a thing. But there’s a difference between having your ideas co-opted by computer technology and using it to enhance your product. I would react very poorly if a producer was like, I AI-ed an idea for you! It’s a horrible thing when it takes away the human element, because we don’t have art if we don’t have humans. The expressions that come out of our humanity are incredibly important to our civilisation.

Avatar: Fire and Ash is in cinemas, including BFI IMAX, now.

A James Cameron season plays at BFI IMAX throughout December.