Paramount teases fans with the air bending effects in The Last Airbender.

Inside a vast warehouse in the suburbs of Philadelphia, VFXWorld got an exclusive peek at the movie magic being created for the much-anticipated, live-action adaptation of the popular Nickelodeon series The Last Airbender. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan and produced by blockbuster impresarios Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, The Last Airbender is Paramount's bid to create their own full scale epic franchise a la Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings.

Based on the successful animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko (also exec producers on the film), the feature just wrapped principal photography at soundstages around Philadelphia and tells the story of a magical world split into nations representing the four elements: Air, Water, Earth and Fire. Their peaceful existences are thrown out of balance when the Fire Nation wages war on the other nations. Throughout a century a terrible war is waged until a small boy named Aang (Noah Ringer) ignites the hope of peace. An Airbender by birth, Aang is revealed to be the legendary Avatar, the lone person born with the ability to bend all of the elements to their will. In Book One: Water, audiences will come to know Aang and the world he is destined to save.

Fans of the animated series will have high expectations for the live-action feature.

On a private tour with other select journos, VFXWorld initially spoke to Marshall, who explained the scope of the ambitious film.

"We are creating a completely fantastical, make-believe world," Marshall said referencing the cavernous converted soundstage that was home to more than five huge sets representing key sites within the four nations. All of them were impressively practical while also including the telltale greenscreen drapes and vfx set extension markers that portend the vast amount of CG work to come.

Marshall continued, "A couple of firsts on this film for Night: One is shooting all this greenscreen. He's never really done much of that before…at all. He's expanding his talent and range and that's what I find exciting about it. He's taking his filmmaking style and applying it to this fantasy world, which he hasn't done before.

"And for me it's been really exciting because I haven't worked on a movie, that I can remember, that has a totally made up world. We get into a little bit of fantasy in Jurassic Park and Back to the Future, but they are still in the real world. But this is like our Star Wars. We get to have wild imaginative ideas. There are no limits. So the biggest challenge has really been creating this world and how we do it. The Production Designer Phil Messina and the DP Andrew Lesnie [The Lovely Bones and Lord of the Rings trilogy] and the set decorators have really worked together to find different places where we can incorporate what is there into our movie. You'll see that we use some of the structure of this old building to be part of our world," Marshall said in pointing to the steel footings and girders lining the ceilings of what were part of an old motor factory.