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07-30-2009, 10:13 AM
| | VFXWorld investigates Half-Blood Prince natural effects (UPDATED) VFXWorld has a five-page spread on Half-Blood Prince and the natural way in which special effects were created for the sixth film. In part one of their piece, they look at the opening sequence of the film, the attack on the Burrow and Quidditch. Quote:
"And there were some other tricks to give us a sense of lighting within the clouds, first revealing the Warner Bros. logo and then the Harry Potter logo coming through. It's a very architectural set up and then as you begin to push through this, the lightning flashes are timed with the soundtrack, which sounds like a distant war, which relates to an underlying theme of all-out war.
Eventually this pulls us through to modern-day London, which we actually shot on location at the building of the Great London Assembly. It's a very ultra-modernist building very much at odds with the Wizarding world of Harry Potter, which always has that wistful, Dickensian look to it. David Yates has liked using modernist architecture for depicting the Muggle world.
An atrium of clouds builds up with a very strong architectural sense. The huge Dark Mark falls over London. That was a real achievement using DN Squirt. We wrote a few new tricks and tools for it that allowed us to work with the underlying geometry of the Dark Mark, particularly a huge scull with giant fangs, and basically fill it with clouds. But then as we're animating it, we're getting all of the edges tearing away and bleeding away. It's a balance between natural cloud forms and the stylistic shape of this skull. We wanted it to look unnatural."
"We got a hold of street plans. And we created a very detailed 3D model of this section of London and then populated it with CG people and vehicles. We developed a new system using Houdini to procedurally model all of the trees. From my point of view, the route that the camera flies in is pretty much the same one that I walk from Charing Cross Station into Double Negative every morning. One of the things about Diagon Alley is that everything had to be carefully hand-made. We took the components of the set usually to extend it based on our imaginations.
"After the Death Eaters grab Ollivander, we cut to the Millennium Bridge. This is a fantastic horizontal suspension bridge outside of the Tate Modern Gallery on the banks of the Thames. We're back in the modern world of steel and glass. The ominous sky is a matte painting derived from a plate that was shot off the roof of Double Negative, with lightning flashes added to it. The three plumes of the Death Eaters descend on the Millennium Bridge and twist around it flying back and forth. They vanish but they cause the bridge to turn and twist and ripple.
We switch to a fully CG bridge and replace the river with a CG river using the dnOcean toolset so that we can create waves and swirling tracks left by the Death Eaters. We shot some close-ups of people on greenscreen. We then created the London environment as a 3D reprojected painting behind that. The bridge begins to break up and we treated it effectively like a character animation and rigged it using our character toolset because the deformations were so extreme. But then the character animation of the bridge drives a secondary dynamic system, which is built using our dnDynamite toolset, and this causes things like the decking planks to pop away and eventually as it really breaks up, we see the suspension cables snaking and whipping away, also using dnDynamite. Eventually, the bridge snaps in two and they originally had animations of people falling into the river but that was deemed to be [too intense]. We were able to animate proper water surfaces using Squirt and some enhancements to Houdini on the top of it."
UPDATE: Part 2, which is two pages long, may be found here, in which water & fire simulation and the Inferi, are discussed with Industrial Light & Magic's Tim Alexander, supervising the vfx and Marc Chu supervising the animation; Quote:
"In the end, the most difficult and interesting work for us was the water and fire simulation," Alexander recalls. "We had three shots external to the cave where Harry and Dumbledore are looking back toward the entrance and that was a fully CG ocean. They actually shot a helicopter plate of it, but the water wasn't wild enough for David Yates. So they asked us to give them a much stormier ocean. And once we go into the cave, it's dominated by a giant lake and the island that Harry and Dumbledore are going to is in the middle of that lake. All of the water is computer generated, even the water that Harry scoops out of the bowl that holds the Horcrux."
Quote:
According to Tim Burke, the overall visual effects supervisor, "David was pretty keen on giving them an unnerving presence but didn't want in any way to create a zombie type of character. He wanted a human character you could empathize with, that even evoked sadness. At the end of the day, these are dead souls. We came up with a design that went beyond what was possible with an emaciated human: very skinny with all the bones and ribcage showing and spending all the time underwater with the effects of gray skin. We developed this concept with ILM. They developed different variations of heads in ZBrush so we could populate this world with hundreds of these characters. And we started looking at how they moved and having done some studies of movement and getting to the point where we didn't have any reference material, we turned it over to ILM to work on their animation skills and they came up with pretty normal human type movement."
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07-30-2009, 10:57 AM
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#2 (permalink)
| Antipodean Opaleye
Join Date: Mar 2008
Posts: 9,800
Hogwarts RPG Name: Rose Isabelle White Third Year Ministry RPG Name:
John Milloy Magical Transportation | SuperMegaFoxyAwesomeHot | Everybody lies | Awesomesauce! ♥
Wow that is pretty cool!
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"I was a born troublemaker and might as well earn a living at it." Fan Clubs ______________ Bonnie ______________ Level 6 |
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07-30-2009, 11:09 AM
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#3 (permalink)
| Bundimun
Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: Budapest,Hungary
Posts: 21
Hogwarts RPG Name: severus snape Graduated |
well,i would be glad to try those programs out or some sort of stuff that can animate
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07-30-2009, 11:48 AM
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#4 (permalink)
| Fire Slug
Join Date: Jul 2008 Location: London, England
Posts: 158
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I wish they had left in the people falling into the river, that wouldn't of been too extreme, but I guess WB wanted that PG rating in the U.S
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07-30-2009, 12:13 PM
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#5 (permalink)
| Doxy
Join Date: Mar 2008 Location: Florida
Posts: 6,438
| My Cherie Amour
that was an interesting article.
__________________ Cherie |
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07-30-2009, 01:51 PM
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#6 (permalink)
| Puffskein
Join Date: Aug 2008 Location: Boston, MA
Posts: 1,076
Hogwarts RPG Name: Aurora Dahlia Pennant |
Very Interesting!
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07-30-2009, 02:16 PM
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#7 (permalink)
| Fire Slug
Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: Puerto Rico
Posts: 152
Hogwarts RPG Name: Aby White Third Year Diagon Alley |
The effects were brilliant in Half-Blood Prince!!
__________________ Delis |
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07-30-2009, 02:16 PM
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#8 (permalink)
| Puffskein
Join Date: Sep 2007
Posts: 2,041
| Chaos Creator Twins' Conscience
Wow, sounds really complicated! =)
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07-30-2009, 02:22 PM
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#9 (permalink)
| Puffskein
Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Ottery St Catchpole
Posts: 1,950
Hogwarts RPG Name: Olena Tymoshenko Second Year |
Wow, that's amazing!
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07-30-2009, 02:22 PM
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#10 (permalink)
| Red Cap
Join Date: Jul 2009
Posts: 78
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they originally had animations of people falling into the river but that was deemed to be [too intense].
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Fail
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07-30-2009, 02:24 PM
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#11 (permalink)
| Puffskein
Join Date: Jan 2009 Location: Maryland
Posts: 1,153
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That scene with the bridge and the whole DE scene was unbelievably amazing and very intense.
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07-30-2009, 02:49 PM
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#12 (permalink)
| Puffskein
Join Date: May 2009 Location: Missouri
Posts: 1,534
Hogwarts RPG Name: Lily Adams First Year |
That is so cool!
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07-30-2009, 03:06 PM
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#13 (permalink)
| Grindylow
Join Date: Jun 2009 Location: GMT+2
Posts: 14,145
Hogwarts RPG Name: Cheryl Fitzgerald Sixth Year | Manananal مش عارفة
Interesting stuff !
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07-30-2009, 04:44 PM
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#14 (permalink)
| DMT Mountain Troll
Join Date: Jul 2009
Posts: 23,573
x8
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very cool!
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07-30-2009, 05:18 PM
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#15 (permalink)
| Puffskein
Join Date: May 2007
Posts: 1,314
Second Year |
WOW. That must be really complicated. I'm impressed by how much work goes into just those scenes. The bridge collapsing was a really good part, I didn't complain at all! And I LOVED the fire scene in the cave. Breathtaking!
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Harry Potter is love.
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07-30-2009, 05:23 PM
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#16 (permalink)
| Moonlight Dueler Billywig
Join Date: May 2007 Location: California
Posts: 3,193
Hogwarts RPG Name: Hayden Lynette Thomas Ministry RPG Name:
Antwone Thomas Magical Creatures | Quote:
Originally Posted by Milau ELF I wish they had left in the people falling into the river, that wouldn't of been too extreme, but I guess WB wanted that PG rating in the U.S Yeah I was just a tad disappointed that everyone on that bridge survived.
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07-30-2009, 06:51 PM
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#17 (permalink)
| Mooncalf
Join Date: Mar 2009
Posts: 6,309
Hogwarts RPG Name: isabella Macmillan Sixth Year Ministry RPG Name:
Laura Thomas International Cooperation |
honestly speaking i havent got a chance to see HBP yet...but as soon as i saw the graphics of the movie i was like 'hey i want to watch this in theater. they will be cool' the graphics are really good this time...kudos to the graphics section...and David yates ofcourse...
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07-30-2009, 07:41 PM
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#18 (permalink)
| Jarvey
Join Date: May 2009 Location: Puerto Rico
Posts: 638
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WoW! That's interesting!
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07-30-2009, 08:37 PM
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#19 (permalink)
| Fire Slug
Join Date: Dec 2007 Location: Southeastern US
Posts: 150
Hogwarts RPG Name: Kathleen Tierney Egan |
That was really interesting. I love to know how they do things like that. And it's really weird to find out just how much CGI stuff goes into it because it feels so real when you're sitting in the theater.
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07-30-2009, 09:47 PM
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#20 (permalink)
| Bundimun
Join Date: Jul 2009
Posts: 31
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I have not seen the movie yet, but the effects are great. I just wonder what parts of the story they had to cut for it.
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07-31-2009, 08:11 AM
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#21 (permalink)
| Banned Firecrab
Join Date: Jun 2009 Location: hogwarts
Posts: 922
Hogwarts RPG Name: Louise Blueberry First Year |
cool that sounds great can not wait to see the film
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07-31-2009, 11:22 AM
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#22 (permalink)
| Crup
Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: Cardiff, Wales, UK
Posts: 17,077
Hogwarts RPG Name: Marcella Riddle Graduated | Kaplinski Rival Sorting Hat Machine Quote:
Originally Posted by Milau ELF I wish they had left in the people falling into the river, that wouldn't of been too extreme, but I guess WB wanted that PG rating in the U.S That still baffles me. The film isn't PG, period. It even confused David Heyman, so I doubt they were gunning for it.
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07-31-2009, 04:10 PM
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#23 (permalink)
| Dugbog
Join Date: May 2009
Posts: 124
| Quote:
Originally Posted by WeasleyTwin they originally had animations of people falling into the river but that was deemed to be [too intense].
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Fail Oh yes I agree so much, quite a big fail, I'm reallly annoyed now that they did that, I really do not think having people fall off that bridge would of been too intense, I mean it wouldn't of struck an R rating if they did that. Titanic got away with a PG-13 and they had ppl falling off things and worse. Only way I could of seen it being too far is if they had a few children and maybe a woman and her baby fall off that bridge, now THAT would of been too intense, but I think they need to show how much of a threat the Death Eaters are and I dont think they've done that great of a job showing how dangerous they can be in these movies so far seeing what they did with the Battle at the Ministry and how that was watered down and made them look weak. Okay my rant is done ^^
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08-01-2009, 01:44 AM
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#24 (permalink)
| McFly McFan Jarvey
Join Date: May 2008 Location: Godric Hollow
Posts: 647
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Wow! that sound so complicated...but the result was brilliant!! Love the effects in the movie....my fav scene is the bridge!! Looks so real....the effects were crazy!!
__________________ Lily Evans |
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08-01-2009, 04:51 AM
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#25 (permalink)
| Puffskein
Join Date: May 2006 Location: out with the cullens
Posts: 2,344
| Awesome
very interesting
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