Dementors and More

Rising Sun created more than 250 VFX shots for Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Parts 1 & 2. Several sequences involved environments, characters or props from previous films, among them the Dementors, the Ministry of Magic and Hogwarts, as well as bespoke effects such as wands, patronus shields and the invisibility cloak. A number of these shots were shared with multiple vendors in the U.K., which required close collaboration with them and the production team to create a seamless experience.

For the Dementors, Rising Sun Pictures’ job was to create improved versions of these frightful, wraith-like creatures in black robes without souls or eyes. For the second film, RSP had to implement a crowd solution as swarms of hundreds of Dementors attacked Hogwart’s.

For the title sequence of Part 1, RSP created the arrival of Snape at Malfoy Manor. Seen from above, Snape first appears in the guise of a bat-like Death Eater, but then transforms to human form.

“We needed to start out in the sky with a bat-like creature and end up with a man walking into a building,” explains RSP Visual Effects Supervisor Sean Mathiesen. “In the past Death Eaters felt like they were shrouded in smoke, when in fact the character should be made of smoke. The very bones of the character should be made of smoke. But what does a person made of smoke look like?”

“After much experimentation, we arrived at a look and animation that worked,” adds Mathiesen. “This was turned over to the animation team to execute.”

The Maya cloth team that worked on the Dementors established a set of falling robes that felt natural and could merge with the clothing of the real character Snape. Meanwhile, the Houdini team built a wave of smoke that built up into the solid parts of Snape’s flesh. “We draped the Maya cloth over the Houdini smoke creature until we eventually ended up with the real live actor,” says Mathiesen. “The entire thing was composited in Nuke, along with a few real world elements to take the CG edge off.”

Rising Sun Pictures was also tasked with creating the Locket Horcrux, a giant but ephemeral object that Lord Voldemort uses to hide part of his soul. It fell to RSP’s design team to visualize the character’s corporeal form. “They wanted something pretty sensational, but weren’t sure exactly what,” recalls Mathiesen. “Our concept artist did some sketches and we sent them to London. They liked what he’d done and chose one that most accurately reflected their thoughts—except that they wanted it to be 20- to 30-feet tall.”

Refining the design took nearly a year, but by then the concept of the character was so well formed that the actual execution went smoothly. “They shot the live action sequence very late, so while we were working on it, we didn’t really know how it would fit,” says Mathiesen. “We had to make something that would be applicable to almost any circumstances, and when they delivered the plates we were lucky enough, or perhaps had been wise enough, that the effect was easy to drop in and apply.”

Part 2 was also released in stereoscopic 3D, so a number of RSP shots were created in true stereo for that version of the film. Working with the production team and stereographer, RSP ensured that the 3D version of the effects worked correctly and were consistent with the movie as a whole.