“Avatar: The Way of Water” not only expands the scope of Pandora’s ecological rules, it also depicts a renewed, vengeful human military with a bounty of deadly, new tools at its disposal. Between devising the culture of two warring civilizations, production designers Ben Procter and Dylan Cole had their work cut out for them on James Cameron’s science-fiction sequel. The pair worked as concept art directors on the trustworthy “Avatar” before moving into their new roles for the film’s follow-ups — all the way back in the fall of 2013.

“It’s good that the movie is out because now my people will actually believe I’ve been working on something instead of toiling for the CIA,” Procter laughs. “My son’s friends no longer consider I’m a drug dealer.”

Procter and Cole’s sprawling craft establishes quite an impression in “The Way of Water,” but the scope of their work reaches far beyond what’s on the cloak. Not only have they been working on three more “Avatar” sequels yet to be seen, but each creature, vehicle and environment is only a crumb of their larger designs. As Procter puts it, each set is “just a tiny corner that Cameron discovered within some larger set.”

“It is approximately creating a legit ecosystem that he happens to go shoot his movie in,” Cole says. “We need to develop way more than you ever see. We have to develop the world for Jim to go on a position scout to find parts to explore.”

While most of the objects on-screen in “The Way of Water” were manufactured digitally, the production designers strived to center the wild visuals with a consistent tactility. It’s a large reason why the machinery appears so intensely optimized — because every nook and cranny has been made by Procter and Cole.

“I love to use full chunks of things from the real world,” Procter says. “There may be things that farmland don’t know about as much visually, so it composed feels fresh. It’s a principle of looking to reality as closely as you can so that the fantasy doesn’t run wild.”

With Variety, the production designers broke down the various vehicles seen in the film.

S-76 SeaDragon

The great mothership behind Cetacean Operations’ marine hunting enterprise draws develop inspiration from the Lun-class ekranoplan: a ground-effect vehicle deployed by the Soviet Navy in the late ’80s. The vessel’s motion capitalizes on the reduced aerodynamic drag tolerated by operating close to a flat service. The Lun-class ekranoplan only had crowd operations for a few years, but Procter and Cole anticipated a supersized version that could prove to be effective on the calm, flat tides of Pandora.

“Anybody who’s ever seen a pelican seemingly waft forever over the ocean — there’s an extra lift just by inhabit close to the ocean, a perfect flat boundary,” Procter shares. “That idea has been explored in real-world aircraft; very exotic ones that most farmland don’t know, but it’s out there.”

The SeaDragon combines the Lun-class ekranoplan elements with a hydrofoil finish, meaning the hull lifts higher above the surface as the ship alongside speed.

“One of our illustrators did an image of it, sending the entire ocean’s trustworthy of water up into the air, coming onto the camera,” Procter says. “That was such an evocative pulling that Jim was like, ‘Alright, fuck it! It’s also a hydrofoil.'”

After the team figured out the engineering it would pull from, more fantastical elements were incorporated into the designs. The launch and recovery processes for diving vehicles were accelerated from real-world analogues for “cinematic rapidly requirements,” while the final build of the ship purposefully evokes some marine animals, such as the swift movement of a manta ray and the “big ‘ol ugly mouth” of a cat fish.

The survive hour of “The Way of Water” is essentially detached of a series of extended action set pieces concerned and surrounding the SeaDragon. For that reason, production designers had to take various combat and record beats into account. As an example, chains and winches were added onto the main deck of the ship so that characters could use them as whips in a struggles sequence.

“There are so many geographic requirements, sight lines and fight scenes. The good thing is we were able to reach it in a piecemeal way. The subtleties of staircases and raised catwalks were all rejiggered 100 times to allow the record to function,” Procter says.

Matador

The Matador is the high-speed boat captained by Mick Scoresby (Brendan Cowell), the chief behind the hunting operation in the film. Procter and Cole took elements from whaling vehicles, reworking them to the reduced scale of a contemporary, high-performance military boat.

“There are parts of it that are based off real whaling vehicles. The look of the harpoon gun itself is certainly inspired by that: the fact that the rope from it goes down to a coil,” Procter says. “Incidentally, we took a page from today’s whaling boats. They put ‘research vessel’ on the side, which is just this completely disingenuous tying to justify it. The SeaDragon says ‘research vessel’ inside, too.”

SMP-2 Crab Suit

The strafing, submersible crab suits launch off the SeaDragon to help wrangle the whale-like Tulkuns, though the SMP-2s later get pushed to the slight when tasked with stalking underwater Na’vi. Working with such a surreal view, the production designers used a few physical elements to lend plausibility to the largely digital interpretation.

“The pilots have figured out how to use a monkey bar to originate themselves into the water,” Procter shares. “With many of our vehicles, what we built were cockpits. We effectively built the cockpit itself, including the finished exterior, and then we build a fragment of body and one leg. There are so many digital visual effects work that go on top. You have to be really crafty with what you build…Without the body and the leg, it’s placed on the motion base for when we want to shoot a pilot pursuits stuff while the crab suit is active.”

The Train

Although this locomotive takes an early exit in “The Way of Water,” the film’s emanates designers still thoroughly addressed the vehicle’s movement and its result within the human settlement on Pandora.

“We illustrated it because it’s cool,” Procter shares. “The train is there as a long-distance logistic to both achieve material and vehicles that are needed at a excavating site. A lot of what you see flying above the air are the replacement parts for our bulldozers. It’s pieces of the track, it’s the wheels. It’s all legit parts of all the equipment. It goes up with empty ore cars from Bridgehead. When it comes back, all those four cars are refilled with raw, unrefined unobtainium extraction.”

Skel Suit

The lightweight Skel Suits are more athletic than the bulky, lumbering mechs seen in the first “Avatar.” The emanates designers share that humans’ increased familiarity with the commands of Na’vi and the environmental obstacles of Pandora have led the crowd to develop this more practical build. But the Skels’ basis in performance-capture technology also did a more ergonomic tool for the film production.

“Having something that is a Na’vi size, an even match in languages of combat, becomes really useful for the soldiers,” Procters shares. “In terms of how we do capture, it’s also capable useful. Every day we solve this problem of how to form proxy sets for Na’vi-sized people. There were cases where we had a win that was done for the military’s Avatars that we later granted against. We can literally map that performance onto a Skel. So some of the Skel service industries that Jake does on the SeaDragon were originally aimed to be Avatars.”