Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/759864
18 cgw n o v e m b e r . d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 6 "The creature design was within our department, not the art department," Manz says. "We ended up with a couple hundred creature designs, with many iterations of each. Pickett alone had 200 concepts." Pickett is Newt Scamander's personal Bowtruckle, a magical creature that Manz describes as a little green stickman made of shoots. "As we were designing Pickett, we had Pablo [Grillo] and his animation team, mod- elers, riggers, and texture artists build simple versions of this character and others," Manz says. "We built a menagerie and tested the creatures with animation. The animators would get a creature moving to see whether it would work as a character and to show to David [Yates]. If the design wasn't right, we'd move it back. Our aim was to hand facilities something that was somewhat worked out already for them to flesh out and bring to life." At the same time, artists were working out the action sequences with a similar goal – that their work could move on to postvis and become finished shots. "Soware has gotten more powerful, so artists can work quicker," Manz says. "But the key was having a talented group of artists. They were really creative." Adds Burke, "Previs has developed so much with companies like The Third Floor and Proof. They have fast techniques for knocking shots out with pretty good ani- mation that tells stories. And, we could put creatures into previs shots." Because creature design and animation studies had begun early in preproduction, when it came time for the shoot, people on the crew knew what the creatures looked like and how they moved. It also meant that actor Eddie Redmayne, who plays Newt, had something more than a ball on a stick to look at when he needed to act with a creature. The crew created maquettes and puppets based on the preproduction designs for each creature that would have significant interaction with the actors. "We created a series of a half-dozen or so creatures, from small maquettes and pup- pets to one 17-by-20-foot puppet operated by four puppeteers led by Robin [Guiver, supervising creature puppeteer]," Burke explains. "We brought in people who had worked on the 'War Horse' stage play. The characters we had already created drove their performances. We gave [the puppe- teers] our previs and animation studies, and they learned how the creatures would move. And, we'd all come up with ideas. Robin worked closely with Pablo [Grillo], David [Yates], and Eddie [Redmayne]. Pablo would be on set talking to Eddie. We would do a rehearsal with the puppets and get the eyelines working. Then, we'd shoot, see what worked, choose a take, and then shoot clean plates aer. It was quite collaborative." That kind of sophisticated interactive work with the actors on set moved into oth- er areas, as well. Rather than working with locked cuts, the visual effects artists took sequences from the editor and blocked out creatures using previs and the performances on set. "We were almost giving the director dai- lies," Burke says. "Because we were involved early in the process, we could have cuts with characters in the plates. It really sped up the process and was something we could not have done five years ago." ON SET Although the film takes place in various New York City neighborhoods, 99 percent of the filming happened at Warner Bros' Leaves- EDDIE REDMAYNE AS NEWT SCAMANDER ENCOUNTERS A FANTASTIC BEAST, THIS ONE BEING A THUNDERBIRD.