As all of you know, special effects are quite important to a fantastical movie such as Harry Potter. As many as 11 companies were hired for the making of
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, each one working on various parts of the movie, from the Forbidden Forest, to Voldemort’s lack of a nose. Creating creatures such as Dobby, Kreacher or Grawp, is not an easy process… Most muggles would agree.
However,
fxguide.com managed to describe this lengthy process as simply as can be done. Although still technical, the article gives Harry Potter fans an idea of how things are done behind the scenes.
Double Negative, the main company working on
Order of the Phoenix spent 19 months working on scenes in Hogwarts, the Hall of Prophecies, the Forbidden Forest, as well as the Room of Requirements, employing more than 250 artists, developers and technicians. They went as far as redesigning the Patronus seen in
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, for Dumbledore’s Army:
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Double Negative creature animators used Maya to produce the veritable menagerie of otters, dogs, hares and horses which weave their ways between the children in spirited fashion. The 3D creatures were used to generate spiraling trails, which were then mapped with VFX shaders producing complex, coruscating patterns of light.
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You may also remember the scene in the Hall of Prophecies, where Ginny casts a Reducto spell, so powerful that the room’s shelves, filled with prophecies, toppled over, creating a domino effect. Although, at the time, you might have been so enchanted by the movie that you didn’t imagine how it could have been done, fxguide.com has an explanation.
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Ginny’s wand blast was created with a combination of particle dynamics and fluid effects, the resultant explosion was generated with more dynamics and animating 3D holdout mattes that expand through the rows of shelves. The toppling shelves and smashing spheres made extensive use of dnDynamite, Double Negative's in-house dynamics toolset, which can handle far higher levels of complexity than any commercially available package.
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Framestore CFC is returning to the Potter movies after having designed the cornish pixies and Buckbeak the hippogriff. In
Order of the Phoenix, they were the creators of the Centaurs and of Kreacher. Craig Lyn, the VFX supervisor, explains new challenges the company has encountered while working on the centaurs:
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"Purely from a technical point of view, there were a number of aspects to the centaurs that Framestore CFC hadn't tackled before," says Lyn, "Skin moving over muscle, the muscle dynamics and the dynamic hair simulations, for example. Not only that, but there were up to twelve of them onscreen at once."
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The nine other companies who worked on the movie are the following :
Baseblack
Cinesite
Gentle Giant Studios
Ghost ApS
Industrial Light & Magic (ILM)
Machine
Moving Picture Company (MPC)
Rising Sun Pictures
Visual Effects Company, For motion control
