Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/26447
Visual Effects ■ ■ ■ ■ It’s all about growing up, really, isn’t it? Harry Potter and his wizardly friends in the series of books by JK Rowling. T e actors in the seven fi lm versions who have aged in concert with the characters they play. And, no less, the visual eff ects crews who have been making screen magic for the past 10 years. T ink of the eff ects in the fi rst Harry Potter fi lm. T ey may have been state of the art at the time, but by today’s standards, they seem almost, well, if not childish, then “tweenish.” Back then, there were no GPUs for accelerated graphics, no 3D compositing programs, no Mova for real-time facial capture, no subsurface scattering. And the list goes on. “Eff ects have defi nitely gotten more sophisticated in the 10 years or so since the fi rst fi lm,” says visual eff ects supervisor Tim Burke, who had just completed work on Warner Bros. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, his sixth trip to Hogwarts. Except that Hogwarts doesn’t appear in this fi lm. “Harry and his friends travel in search of Horcruxes, and they end up in a chase the scale of which we wouldn’t have taken on before,” Burke says. “From animation to environments, it was a huge task. And the quality of the characters—the tools the animators are using now give such realism.” Many of the same UK-based studios that had worked on previous Harry Potter fi lms drove the eff ects in Deathly Hallows, along with Rising Sun from Australia returning as well. Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), which had worked on the previous six fi lms, dropped out of this one. “For various reasons, when we put it out to tender again, things switched around,” Burke says. For example, Cinesite rather than T e Moving Picture Company (MPC) reshaped Voldemort’s nose, and Rising Sun rather than MPC created the Ministry of Magic (for an in-depth look at this work and more, see the online feature “A Magic Touch” on www.cgw.com). Perhaps this was because the MPC artists had their hands full dealing with one of the largest and most complex sequences. Of the 170 shots created at MPC, more than half take place during this sequence. MPC: Seven Harry Potters T e MPC sequence begins with Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliff e) in the Dursley’s house on Privet Drive, where he had lived in a cupboard under the stairs as a child. He’s on the run from Voldemort and that evil wizard’s soul-sucking Dementors. To Harry’s surprise, six friends appear armed with a plan for getting Harry to a safe house. “T eir technique was to use a Polyjuice potion to turn every- one into Harry Potter,” Burke says. T e magic happens quickly in the fi lm, but at MPC, 15 artists worked for fi ve months on the trans- formation shot. Because director David Yates wanted something unique, the artists couldn’t do quick morphs from the various actors’ faces into Dan Radcliff e’s face. “He wanted to keep them in the process until the camera comes all the way around,” explains Nicolas Aithadi, visual eff ects super visor at MPC. Only when the camera has circled and moved behind Harry Potter, giving us his point of view, do January/February 2011 33