Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/42006
n n n n Visual Effects needed to add a huge viaduct on the front of the school, the main entrance where Voldemort would attack and where they would defend the school, the open courtyard, battlements, and the wooden bridge, which is a main attack route from one side of the school. None of that existed. So, we did away with miniatures. Who built the digital Hogwarts? Did they build a CG version of the entire school inside and out? Double Negative started the building and destruction process for Hogwarts in 2008 with Stuart Craig [production designer] while we were still filming Half-Blood Prince; it took 18 months. Because we had designed the sequence in previs, we realized we didn't need to build the back half of the school, so we focused on a 180-degree area. Stuart Craig designed an iconic image of what the partially destroyed Hogwarts would look like. We filmed on par- tial sets and greenscreen—we had a partial set for the courtyard, a separate set for part of the viaduct and part of the bridge, and an interior set for part of the battlement. We take the camera from the far hillside in one move, through a window to find the Death Eaters fighting. Voldemort's army ar- rives on Voldemort's rock on one side, and on Had you done environments this exten- sive for the previous films? The biggest environment in a prior film was the opening sequence for Half-Blood Prince, which was a rebuild of London from Trafalgar Square to Charing Cross, also by DNeg. But, this was more ambitious. It covered a far greater area, and the resolution was far greater. Our environments have gotten better and better with every film. We surveyed environ- ments in Scotland, and we have the topogra- phy, so we no longer sent film crews to shoot plates. We created a Scotland-like world that has a loch, mountains, the school, and sev- eral miles of environments that we built and worked over. We see it in the daytime, sun- light, predawn, and at night—all these light- ing conditions. It was lit and relit, and it looks photographically realistic. When you watch this film, you believe it's there. The environ- built the rock Voldemort arrives on; it was less than 50 feet across. Then we put that rock in the middle of a [CG] environment, put thou- sands of Death Eaters around him, and had huge, swooping camera moves. We created the geography of the world and dropped it around the sets using a correct combination of different pieces. It was a big jigsaw puzzle. Before, when the school was a miniature, we'd shoot the background plates, and then months down the line, we wouldn't be able to change anything. On this film, we redesigned the whole end sequence with Voldemort four weeks before we delivered the film. David [Yates] was putting new ideas in, and because we had this huge digital asset, we could do them. This would have scared the facilities a few years ago. But they did such a great job creating the assets that we could keep changing the shots. We had great flexibility at the back end. I think it is one of our biggest achievements. How did you allocate the work? We always knew that no one facility could take all the work of the battle, so we had to split the action cleverly. We gave everything on one side of the school—the end of the court- yard and the beginning of the viaduct and the hillside—to MPC because they could use their crowd software, Alice, for the Death Eat- ers and the crowds. Then, because the giants and knights featured heavily in the battle, we gave that work to their animation team. MPC handled the main action, the knights, the giants, Voldemort's army for the attack, and the fighting. They also did the fire simula- tion—they created animals out of fire. For the the other side, the snatchers (the humans who turned to the dark side) attack on the other bridge. One of the biggest jobs was linking all these action sequences and the environment to- gether. David wanted signature camera moves. What do you mean by "linking"? When I say 'linking,' I mean visually put- ting the world together so the audience under- stands the layout even though these things were fairly small sets with greenscreen. Because of the shot design, we see areas in many shots that obviously didn't exist. Sometimes we had a real set in the courtyard and everything else was CG. We had elements of the viaduct and everything else was CG. Even if the set is prominent, everything behind it is CG. We 18 August/September 2011 Voldemort and his armies destroy a digital Hogwarts within a digital environment created by artists at Double Negative and The Moving Picture Company. He lost his nose, though, at Cinesite. ments are not off in the distance. We placed the action in the middle of them. In terms of pushing the technology, this is one of the biggest things. We couldn't have done it a few years ago because of the sheer amount of data. I think the techni- cal assets and software developed to handle all this are phenomenal and don't get much appreciation. People take environments for granted; they don't think, 'Hold on. None of this is real.' But, they gave us flexibility. More flexibility than when you worked with the miniatures on set? giants, we decided to use actors and scale them and have CG facial prosthetics for the final close-ups. Everything on the other side—the bridge, the destruction of the school, and the aerial work—went to Double Negative; DNeg did the environment work for the school and bridge destruction. So, one became the miniature for the other. MPC would do the animation and work out the action, and then provide cameras to DNeg to create the background, light it, and com- posite it. Or, if DNeg did the action in the foreground, MPC would do the background. These two vendors had the heaviest work.