Fantastic Feats

Screen International For the first of Warner Bros. planned five film follow up to the Harry Potter franchise, the visual effects team transposed J.K. Rowling’s wizarding world to 1926 New York. 026 http://edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/launch.aspx?eid=377b08c9-f076-4dc1-b4a0-b3793864163f Set in 1926, Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them introduces Magizoologist, Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), on an expedition to New York City, carrying endangered magical creatures inside a special suitcase.  “One of the lovely things about the world of Potter was that even though it was magical it felt grounded in realism,” says Tim Burke, who with Christian Manz were the project’s VFX supervisors. “That was always our goal with Beasts. We wanted to create an environment that would allow the audience to feel they hadn’t seen anything like these creatures before yet not so fantastical that they couldn’t exist in the wild.” Taking a cue from vintage Harold Lloyd film Speedy, which depicts the hustle and bustle of New York in 1928, Stuart Craig’s production design grounded the tale “in a city in chaos, where everybody is busy building a new life,” says Burke. CG background plates of New York were blended with studio work at Leavesden and footage shot on location in Birmingham and Liverpool. Burke and Manz, who both worked on the Potter films along with director David Yates, divided the film’s set-piece sequences (the suitcase and the climactic Oscurus) between them with Framestore anchoring the work of nine facilities. A number of creatures featured in the script and Rowling’s book but the $180 million production had scope to imagine a larger menagerie. “David was clear that each creature should be included for a reason, rather than just forming part of the background,” explains Manz. “This meant giving each one a character as well as a look. As we went from 3D model to animation (led by animated supervisor Pablo Grillo) and back again over iterations we were able to develop stories for them which fitted the purpose of the script. Since we were also briefed to design a lot of the action sequences this meant the look, the characters and story were evolving at the same time.”  The Niffler, a small, furry rodent with a duckbill which robs a bank in the opening scene, had appeared in Potter book Goblet of Fire. Inspiration for its animation came from video of a honey badger raiding a refrigerator and a cupboard for food.  For the Erumpent, also mentioned in the Potter books, conceptual artist Rob Bliss drew on rhino, hippos and bison. Again the aim was not to make the creature too fancy despite a liquid sack with electrical current on the Erumpent's forehead.  “We wanted to give her a slight feminine quality without being too cartoony,” says Burke. “We found footage of a man in the midwest of America who kept bison and had invited one into his house. It was amazing how this large beast suddenly moved cautiously, daintily in the living room.” Inside the case The zoo hidden inside Newt’s suitcase demanded a complex melding of environments, creature design and camera choreography. “The idea was to show as wide a variety of creature as possible in their natural habitat,” explains Manz. “We planned to have Newt walk through a safari which we would shoot on location. When J.K Rowling saw our presentation she suggested that it would take a wizard more powerful than Voldemort to have created it - and Newt is not a great wizard. So, we had to pare our ideas back and came up with more of a ‘Heath Robinson’ approach in which Newt had patched each creature’s pen together.” The touch stone were museum and zoo dioramas. “We wanted distinct spaces where the creatures might feel at home and could roam, centered around Newt’s shed. The first reveal of the world inside the suitcase was to be of the shed, and then we take the audience outside to reveal even more.” Designed as a single 10-minute shot to achieve an experiential or dreamlike state, the sequence worked more coherently when cut, although sections of the longer shot remain. After working out which elements would be digital and which physical elements needed building, the VFX team blocked out the camera moves on a soundstage. “The pre-viz was pretty close to the final timing and set-up of the shot,” says Manz. “[DP] Philippe Rousselot was very happy with the camera moves we’d designed.” Acting opposite computer-generated beings tends to involve simple devices like a tennis ball on a stick to help actors establish an eyeline. Since Newt’s relationship with the beasts, with which he is supposedly friends, was so important to actor Eddie Redmayne, puppets were used in pre-production.  These ranged from simple maquettes of a stick-insect-like Bowtruckle, to glove puppets of the Niffler and a full scale version of the Erumpent built as a 17ft wide 20ft high carbon fibre frame and operated by the puppeteers behind the War Horse character in the stage play. Newt’s mating dance with the Erumpent was worked out between Redmayne, a choreographer and the four puppeteers who took their cues from animation studies. Splitting VFX heavy projects between post houses is not unusual and was a necessity for Beasts because of the many different types of work required including the design of the MACUSA (Magical Congress of the United States of America), seventeen different creatures and set extensions. The suitcase sequence alone married the work of five facilities.  “When we started the Potter films it was believed that only facilities on the U.S west coast could handle this level of complex work but over a decade of Potter confidence in UK companies has grown and grown,” says Burke. The first Harry Potter film in 2000 contained less than 15% of UK produced VFX. By the final film’s production in 2010, more than 85% of the effects were done in Britain. “It got to the point where you didn’t want to give all your work to one big U.S. company because then you’d be tied to their schedule and there was no guarantee they would put their best people on all aspects of it,” he says. “What we can now do is cherry pick the best talent from around the world to do specialist shots rather than overloading one facility.” “It’s also an aesthetic,” adds Manz. “By plugging into different cultures you get different ways of working. You get a European sensibility.”  Beast’s 1500 shots were shared among Soho’s Framestore (Niffler, Erumpent, Blind Pig bar), MPC (a gigantic feathered snake Occamy, the Billiwig fly), Cinesite (a magical dinner in the Goldstein’s house), D-Neg (Obscurus, the giant Thunderbird eagle, New York’s destruction and building repair sequence); Cinesite (dinner in the Goldstein’s house) and Milk (origami rats, Macusa Wand Office). Canada’s Rodeo FX, Image Engine and LA’s Method Studios also contributed. “The main challenge is consistency,” says Manz. “It’s making sure that all the moving parts fitted together, which for the suitcase didn’t happen until the final week of post because there were so many elements. David [Yates] had to have a lot of faith in us.” Conjuring Obscurus The hardest concept to pin down was that of the malevolently evil force Obscurus, described in the script as simply ‘repressed magic’.  “For pre-viz sequences we used various particle or fluid effects or sometimes just shapes which helped us develop the storyline but it didn’t tell us what it was,” explains Burke. Actor Ezra Miller, who played troubled witchfinder Credence, had prepared for his role by developing a “contorted physical performance of anger and rage with this incredible guttural noise”. “We played around with a video of it on Avid, retiming, reversing it and tried to create a broken rhythm,” he says. “David immediately liked what he saw.” Even then, D-Neg had quite a task to translate the actor’s performance into animation. The facility wrote bespoke tools for each scene featuring the Obscurus since it needed to move and react differently at scenes in Times Square, a subway and in the air  “Hopefully we managed to convey emotion through an animation that didn’t have any face or character at all,” says Burke.