Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt2
By the time the Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows Part 1 opened in November 2010, featuring 275 shots contributed by Baseblack, the team was already hard at work on Part 2. Working again with overall VFX Supervisor Tim Burke, Matthew Twyford led Baseblack’s efforts alongside Co-Supervisor Rudi Holzapfel and Producer Kate Phillips.
After a brief recap of the climactic events of Part 1 – showcasing Baseblack’s CG environment for Dumbledore’s Tomb – the film starts on a sombre note as Harry reflects on Dobby’s death at Shell Cottage. Baseblack helped to place the interior set on the coastline, replacing the greenscreens in both directions with views of the beach and sand-dunes. When the trio eventually decide that they must travel back to Diagon Alley with Griphook, they do so via a four-way apparition created by CG Artist Will Correia, who built and animated simple models of the characters which could be elastically deformed before all sucking into a single point.
We next pick up our heroes as they struggle in a lake (after jumping from te back of a dragon, naturally); this sequence was shot in the safety of a tank on a green screen stage with Baseblack contributing a Scottish landscape and lowering sky to the shots, with a great deal of complex keying and grading to create a convincing sense of dark murky water and flat exterior lighting.
After the kids climb from the lake, Baseblack continues to provide the environment around them, but the shots have become considerably more challenging as the camera swoops 720 degrees around the performers in a series of very long, fast moving takes shot on a cable-cam around a green-screen set piece in Leavesden. Having been provided with a series of reference plates of mountains and lakes shot on location in Scotland, CG Supervisor Fred Sundqvist led a team to stitch the photographic elements into a series of panoramas which could be reprojected onto proxy geometry at different levels to allow visible parallax as the camera moved restlessly around. This included the challenge of blending multiple plates of water together to create the illusion of a seamless lake surface moving behind them. Compositors Peter Farkas and Sarah Juniper worked to integrate the live-action plates into the created environment, which included complex water interactions as the trio emerge from the projected lake surface and making sure that the burnt out summertime grass of the live-action set blended with the lusher spring grass of the background plates.
Creating a complete CG environment was a challenge for the team, and they were also faced with the inverse role in another major sequence: defining and implementing a distinctive look for a major character in the form of the Grey Lady, the ghost of Ravenclaw Tower whom Harry seeks out in the hope she can point him towards one of the last Horcruxes. This was the first sequence in Part 2 worked on by Baseblack, who began work on the sequence in June 2010 by creating post-vis for the work in progress cut: matchmoving all of the plates of Daniel Radcliffe performing on an empty set and animating into them a very simple model of the Grey Lady to help the editors block the sequence. This was particularly important since director David Yates wanted the Grey Lady to be capable of sudden ultra-rapid movements around the environment which were hard to visualise.
After a version of the action had been approved, the camera data and line-up information from the tracked plates were exported and provided to the production to drive the motion control shoot on a green-screen stage of Kelly Macdonald’s performance as the Grey Lady. Once plates from the green screen shoot were provided back to Baseblack, work began on developing a look for the ghost. David Yates wanted the Grey Lady to have a shifting, mutating character which visibly reflected her mental state and Lead Compositor Dave Bowman designed a look with a set of variable qualities of displacement, animation and transparency which could be set separately for different sections of the cut or varied dynamically during shots to show the ghost fading in and out visibility.
For one specific shot where the Grey Lady suffers a sudden bout of extreme rage, several different takes of Kelly Macdonald’s were combined in layers to give her an unstable, shifting look. Her teeth and eyes were scaled up, and pulsating veins tracked onto her forehead and shoulders, to give the moment an unsettling and inhuman look.
A separate aspect of the work, developed by Bowman in conjunction with the 3D team, was the creation of a look for the moments when the Grey Lady moves at an unearthly speed through the environment – and even, on one occasion, straight through Harry himself. David Yates had offered the Deluminator from Deathly Hallows Part 1 – itself a Baseblack creation – as a visual reference which presented a considerable challenge. The Deluminator was essentially a moving point of light created as 2D animation, but the Grey Lady was required to transition into that state from recognisably human – and back again – within a handful of frames. The solution involved building a digital double of the character which was sufficiently developed to be able to take over from the live-action performance in the course of a shot and quickly shrink and elongate into a point of light. To help the transition, and to add visual interest to the shot, the Grey Lady’s arms and dress shredded as she picked up speed before turning into iridescent trails of light. Although it was never intended to be seen on screen for more than a few frames, the high quality build of the digital double proved its value when cut changes late in production required the addition of a shot of Grey Lady for which no footage had ever been shot. With a bit of additional modelling and re-texturing, the double was able to step in and make the shot work.
Harry encounters the dead again when he goes to the Forbidden Forest to sacrifice himself, and they were again provided by Baseblack. Unlike the ghostly Helena, however, Harry’s family are brought back by the Resurrection Stone, which emerges from the Snitch in an elegant piece of magical mechanics designed, built and rendered by Robert Grbevski before being composited by Joss Flores. To reflect their different origins, the family themselves had to look visually distinct from the Grey Lady and David Yates wanted their appearance to seem peaceful and serene. After trying many different looks, Sequence Lead John Hardwick settled for a very subtle look, which softened the actors faces and added a gentle glow to them. Since the sequence was all shot in-camera rather than in separate green screen passes, the characters were made transparent by rotoing them off the plates, repainting the background behind them and them mixing them back in.
The Forbidden Forest sequence also featured some set replacement work to extend the forest deep into the background, which was accomplished with layered matte paintings. A more complex environment replacement was required in the sequences taking place around the Hogwarts Boat House. This new set was built on a green screen stage and Baseblack added views in three directions, designed by Co-Supervisor Rudi Holzapfel, involving separate matte paintings for the sky and mountains as well as a massive expanse of CG water. The lake surface presented a particular challenge since it had to blend with a pool of on-set water fairly close to camera. We were also asked to add some fiery reflections to the water surface to demonstrate that Hogwarts is on fire behind the characters. This large environment was paired with some extremely close-up work to create a CG window through which much of the boat house is seen, as Harry crouches outside. After Naweed Khan modelled and textured a window to match the on-set reference, a small 3D team tracked the windows into the plates – sometimes cheating the track with additional animation to ensure all of the relevant action could clearly be seen – before the compositors completed the shots with a set of intricate distortions to reflect the warped glass.
Baseblack’s work on the film reached an explosive conclusion with the ferocious wand battle which rages in the Great Hall and features a long-awaited duel between Molly Weasley and Bellatrix Lestrange. The fight was mainly accomplished through hand-animated wand bursts, augmented with layers of smoke and interactive lighting. Defensive shields were created by wrapping painted textures around hemispheres inside Nuke. For the climactic moment when Bellatrix meets her fate, the original plate was heavily re sped to create a sense of Bellatrix being frozen in space before a transition to a digital double which is then rapidly deformed as her body shrinks and dessicates. The effect is completed with animated cracks which spread over Bellatrix’s face and arms. As Mrs Weasley administers the coup-de-grace, the shrunken digital double is blown apart in an explosion created by Fred Sundqvist and designed to evoke a feeling of burning ash falling to the ground.
Besides these major sequences, Baseblack picked up miscellaneous comps and repairs throughout the film to bring the facility’s total contribution to over 200 shots and just short of 500 across Parts 1 and 2.
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