“Frodo felt something seize him by the ankle, and he fell with a cry. Bill the pony gave a wild neigh of fear, and turned tail and dashed away along the lakeside into the darkness. Sam leaped after him, and then hearing Frodo’s cry he ran back again, weeping and cursing. The others swung round and saw the waters of the lake seething, as if a host of snakes were swimming up from the southern end.

Out from the water a long sinuous tentacle had crawled; it was pale-green and luminous and wet. Its fingered end had hold of Frodo’s foot and was dragging him into the water.”
-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Originally, executives maintained that the Watcher sequence in Fellowship of the Ring could be excised, being essentially superfluous; Peter Jackson was against the idea and was adamant in retaining the scene. “I loved the notion of the scene,” Jackson stated, “and I thought the film needed a good Monster sequence at this [narrative] point in time. I fought for it.” Compared to the scene in the novel, the Watcher in the Water’s attack in Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring film adaptation was greatly emphasized. In the original version of the sequence, the Watcher attacks the Fellowship with its twenty-one, faintly luminous green tentacles — remaining otherwise unseen. In the film, the action of the scene is larger, and the Watcher reveals its appearance, emerging from the water.

Given this intention, the Watcher had to be designed as a whole creature in every detail. Initially, the Weta crew was given absolute freedom to steer in any direction they wanted. Some concepts emphasized the ancient quality of the creature by combining traits of extinct arthropods and mollusks — such as Trilobites and Ammonites. Others were inspired by crustaceans, cnidarians and other deep sea animals. Ultimately, the crew settled upon a creature that would convey malicious intelligence. Visual effects supervisor Richard Taylor related: “we didn’t want the Watcher to be just a tentacled mess, out of control. It had to feel as if it was going specifically for Frodo because it was pursuing the ring.”

Falconer’s Watcher concept – the base of the final design.

An octopus-like concept penned by Daniel Falconer became the basis of the final Watcher; the only changes Jackson requested were to move its eyes up higher and to move its mouth to the top of the face. “We designed it to have two fingers and an opposed tumb at the end of its tentacles,” Taylor continues, “with squid-like suckers on the inside. Its mouth was like a sphincter, and it had six huge wing-like structures down its back, which are closed when it’s below water, but flare into massive wings when it’s above water. We analyzed how and where it would intake air, how it would shield its eyes. We put a lot of time developing its eyes, to give it a look of an old man’s intelligence, with puffy, soft, weepy eye sacs. We deemed it necessary to put in all that time and research, to create a creature that was worthy of the project.”

The design was sculpted into a small-scale maquette, which was digitally scanned to obtain a rough digital model — in turn refined in Maya. As with all of the large scale creatures of The Lord of the Rings films, the animation of the Watcher was designed to resemble stop-motion work. “Both Randy Cook and I come from the stop-motion world,” Animation supervisor Adam Valdez said. “I apprenticed under Phil Tippett for eight years, and learned just about everything I know from him. So that was a factor in the classic style of the creature shots. But, more importantly, it was Peter’s preference. He is a big fan of classic animation, so some element of homage to the work of Ray Harryhausen was incorporated into the creature designs and sequences. It’s not so much that we went for a stop-motion look in the animation; it was more that Peter’s and Randy’s staging of the scenes, with big reveals and other theatrical elements, was reminiscent of stop-motion sequences of the past.”

The movements of the Watcher were based on cephalopods and other mollusks. The most complex element of the animation was coordinating all twelve tentacles of the creature in order to convey the fact they were part of a single intelligence. “It was one of those scenes where, as an animator, you’re fighting to integrate some sort of character and style into it, while dealing with all the technical difficulties,” Valdez related. “Just animating all the tentacles to keep them fluid and powerful and looking as if they were all coming from a single mind was really tough.”

The animation was first established with a lightweight model, which was then finalized with skin and muscle simulations. The skin texture was achieved with displacement maps. Software development supervisor Richard Addison-Wood related: “compared to many others in use, our system was a lot closer to reality, because, just like on a real body, muscle movement was driven by skeletal motion, and the movement of the skin was determined by what the muscles were doing.”

For more pictures of the Watcher, visit the Monster Gallery.

Main Articles:

• Mountain Troll of the Wizarding World
• Fluffy
• Norbert
• Firenze

All at once there was a scraping noise and the egg split open. The baby dragon flopped on to the table. It wasn’t exactly pretty; Harry thought it looked like a crumpled, black umbrella. Its spiny wings were huge compared to its skinny jet body and it had a long snout with wide nostrils, stubs of horns and bulging, orange eyes.

It sneezed. A couple of sparks flew out of its snout.

‘Isn’t he beautiful?’ Hagrid murmured. He reached out a hand to stroke the dragon’s head. It snapped at his fingers, showing pointed fangs.

‘Bless him, look, he knows his mummy!’ said Hagrid.
-J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

In designing Norbert for the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Paul Catling tried to steer close to the description of the creature, particularly emphasizing the proportions of its head, legs and wings compared to its body, and the size of its eyes in regards to the head; Catling focused in giving the character “awkward gawkiness.” As the creature is a baby, the filmmakers resolved that the eponymous ‘ridgeback’ wouldn’t be developed yet. Creative licenses included the colour scheme, more varied than the simple black of the novel version. After a final design was selected, Catling sculpted it into a maquette, which was used as reference for the digital model. Richard Hollander and his team at Rhythms & Hues modeled the creature digitally from scratch. Wrinkly skin and muscle simulations were devised by Mark Rodahl and Will Telford.

Norbert was endowed with subtle iridescence on his back and other details. “He had a bony little rib cage,” Hollander said, “and some nice iridescence on his back, little chicken feet, wet and leathery bat wings, a body like a lizard. We gave him double lids on his eyes, a set of horns on the back of his head, a little pointy tongue, a nice tail that he could swish, and a very bendy neck.”

On set, John Richardson puppeteered a large prop egg by directing air jets from underneath the table. In the hatching shot, the egg is replaced by a digital counterpart, which cracks open with a small gaseous explosion. Hollander commented: “you first see one arm burst out of the egg shell, then he climbs out, bery wobbly, staggers, slips on a piece of eggshell, begins to sniffle, then sneezes, producing a fireball that singes Hagrid’s beard. Chris Columbus wanted us to play the scene like when a little kid pees and people think it’s cute. Norbert is very sweet and innocent, even though he’s a dragon, and Hagrid just loves him.”

The animation process was supervised by Craig Talmy, and performed in Voodoo. Houdini and Vmantra were used by Pauline Ts’o to light and render the dragon; the elements were then composed in Icey by Harry Lam.

For more pictures of Norbert, visit the Monster Gallery.

Harry sniffed and a foul stench reached his nostrils, a mixture of old socks and the kind of public toilet no one seems to clean.

And then they heard it – a low grunting and the shuffling footfalls of gigantic feet. Ron pointed: at the end of a passage to the left, something huge was moving towards them. They shrank into the shadows and watched as it emerged into a patch of moonlight. It was a horrible sight. Twelve feet tall, its skin was a dull, granite grey, its great lumpy body like a boulder with its small bald head perched on top like a coconut. It had short legs thick as tree trunks with flat, horny feet. The smell coming from it was incredible. It was holding a huge wooden club, which dragged along the floor because its arms were so long.
The troll stopped next to a doorway and peered inside. It waggled its long ears, making up its tiny mind, then slouched slowly into the room.
– J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

Design work on the Mountain Troll for Philosopher’s Stone was initiated by Robert Bliss and Paul Catling. “Stuart Craig’s designers were well cast to the film,” said visual effects supervisor Rob Legato. “They were great at coming up with dark and fantastic creatures. The Troll was both of these. We wanted him to be ferocious, but we also wanted him to convey a somewhat dopey look with his eyes, so you hate him and don’t hate him at the same time.”

Robert Bliss’s Troll design.

Bliss and Catlin’s illustrations were translated into maquettes by Nick Dudman’s creature effects team. White resin castings were used to be digitally scanned, and a fully painted model was built for reference.

Due to its stature and proportions, the Troll had to be brought to the screen as a digital creation, which was combined with a series of practical insert models: a pneumatic rig devised by John Richardson swung the Troll’s club. Nick Dudman’s team also built a pair of silicone ‘Troll trousers’ representing its legs, worn by former rugby player Martin Bayfield during filming.

A full-size Troll animatronic representing the creature after it has been knocked unconscious was instead built by Jim Henson’s Character Shop. Shop supervisor Jamie Courtier explained: “we scaled up the maquette and sculpted our twelve-foot-tall Troll in clay. The sculpting was led by Jan Whittaker and Steve Jolley. Our Troll was only seen laying down, but we sculpted him upright so he could be shot standing if Chris Columbus wanted.” The Troll’s skin was moulded in silicone. “The natural displacement of the silicone made the flesh sag naturally either way,” Courtier continues. “Kenny Wilson led molding to make the silicone skin. Graham High and Marie Fraser then fabricated an internal structure and gave him a state-of-the-art animatronic head, built by Adrian Parish and Dan Burnett, which connected to the Henson Performance Control System. This gave the Troll face and finger movement, which Chris requested, so he could twitch and show signs of life that would scare you into thinking he might wake up.”

The Henson Troll was used as reference by the Sony Imageworks team to bring the digital version of the character to life. The visual effects sequences were overseen by CG supervisor David Smith. “As soon as Henson’s had an eyeball or a piece of skin,” said visual effects supervisor Jim Berney, “they’d send it to us for our modelers and shader-writers to play with. Luckily, we did not have to match theirs spot-on, so we built a tremendous amount of detail into our digital version, with wrinkles and polyps and big, thorny warts.”

With medical photographs used as reference, Smith endowed the Troll’s skin with a layer of carbuncles and grime, adding dirt to wrinkles and warts in order for light to interact with subdermal layers. Hair was also added in certain spots of the body. “We added little spotty tufts up on top of his head,” Smith said, “gave him ear hair, armpit hair and a treasure trail going down his belly. No one really knew what he would be wearing. At one point he was going to have a vest, which developed into this complex patchwork with big stitching; but he ended up with a simple loincloth, so Todd Pilger but together a nice simulation to make the belly giggle.”

The Troll was animated by Todd Wilderman and a team of five animators. “The Troll was a walking bulldozer,” said Eric Armstrong, part of the crew. “Knocking down a wall was like knocking over dominoes to him. We imagined he was like a four-year-old. Everything is very basic in the way a child that age reacts — either they’re very happy, or they’re very sad — and that’s just how the Troll was, simple but extreme.”

For the scenes involving Harry interacting with the Troll, a practical approach with a green screen shape used by Radcliffe was first devised, but ultimately discarded in favour of a fully digital version.

For more pictures of the Troll, visit the Monster Gallery.

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For a moment, he was sure he’d walked into a nightmare – this was too much, on top of everything that had happened so far. They weren’t in a room, as he had supposed. They were in a corridor. The forbidden corridor on the third floor. And now they knew why it was forbidden.

They were looking straight into the eyes of a monstrous dog, a dog which filled the whole space between ceiling and floor. It had three heads. Three pairs of rolling, mad eyes; three noses, twitching and quivering in their direction; three drooling mouths, saliva hanging in slippery ropes from yellowish fangs.

It was standing quite still, all six eyes staring at them, and Harry knew that the only reason they weren’t already dead was that their sudden appearance had taken it by surprise, but it was quickly getting over that, there was no mistaking what those thunderous growls meant.
-J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

“We wanted Fluffy to look as much like a real dog as possible,” said Rob Legato, visual effects supervisor of Philosopher’s Stone. “Even though he was enormous and had three heads, we wanted him to be more like something from Ripley’s Believe It or Not, rather than a bizarre mythological beasts. The gag was, when first see him, we’d just see one head without size reference — then, as we panned across, we’d see a second head, then a third. Finally, when he stood up, the camera would tilt up further, and we’d realize that he was this 12-foot monster dog.”

Fluffy’s relatively simple design was created by Robert Bliss, based on the appearance of Rottweilers; the design was then translated in three dimensions with a resin maquette by Nick Dudman’s team, which served as reference to build the digital model.

An insert paw animatronic was devised by Dudman and crew to interact with the child actors. However, Legato intended to bring Fluffy to the screen as a digital creature due to its unique anatomy — three necks joined into a single spinal column.

Conveying Fluffy’s furry coat was a complex task, given the fact that its scale had to be figured out. The digital effects crew ended up “cheating” its scale by cloning textures to cover the surface of the digital model.

Animation of the three-headed dog was assigned to a team led by Paul Jessel. The main inspiration behind the character animation was  — of course — canine behaviour of real dogs (such as ear twitches and facial ticks), adapted to the anatomy of the creature. The animators also faced the challenge of whether or not to synchronize the heads’ movements. Animation supervisor Eric Armstrong commented: “at one point we see Fluffy sleeping, and Chris Columbus wanted Fluffy snoring. This raised the question, did all three of Fluffy’s heads snore at the same time? We came to the conclusion that Fluffy had three heads but one chest, and hence one set of lungs, so all the heads would snore at once.”

To further elaborate the character animation, the digital effects crew decided to endow each of Fluffy’s heads with a distinct, subtle personality expressed through its motion. “We decided that since Fluffy had three heads, and hence three brains, we would give each head a different personality,” Armstrong said. “Fluffy’s head on the far left was the leader — he was more calculating, but reacted less because he was thinking more. The head on the far right was the aggressive one — he was not as fast on the uptake, but he was very quick to attack. The head in the middle was the dimwitted one, and it always took him a while to catch on to what was going on.”

Particular attention was given to Fluffy’s eyes. Visual effects supervisor Jim Berney explained: “the first thing I brought up when I started on this project was that CG eyes have always looked fake to me. We discussed this with all the modelers and physiquers, and we decided that what CG characters had frequently been missing were lacrimal caruncles — tear ducts! Underneath the tear duct, you also have the semilunar membrane, then a thin meniscus layer of moisture at the contact between the eye and the eyelid that creates a highlight. Usually, that’s all missing in CG, and instead you see his perfect cutout around the eye. That’s why most CG characters look dead.”

For more pictures of Fluffy, visit the Monster Gallery.

Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night;
may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.

In the early 30s, Universal was developing a Werewolf film. Aptly titled The Werewolf, the story harkened back to traditional French stories of the loup garou (wolf man). Actor Boris Karloff was pre-cast as the titular character, and make-up artist Jack Pierce designed an extensive Werewolf make-up specifically to fit the actor’s bulky physical traits. In 1935, the project underwent several changes and was retitled as Werewolf of London — which would go on to become Universal’s first Werewolf-themed film. The role originally assigned to Karloff was turned over to Henry Hull — a change that forced Pierce to devise a ‘scaled down’ version of the appliances: not only he needed to fit Hull’s thinner physique, but — as the actor himself argued — the other characters in the film would have to recognize Dr. Glendon even in Werewolf form.

In retrospect, Pierce found this initial effort disappointing; however, at the dawn of the following decade, he was able to resurrect his original concept for Universal’s new Werewolf project — The Wolf Man. With Karloff occupied in other kinds of roles, the part of the Wolf Man was assigned to Lon Chaney Jr. — whose bulky physical features, similar to Karloff’s, allowed Pierce to bring to life his original vision. As envisioned by the artist, the Wolf Man was a hybrid creature leaning more towards the human side of the spectrum, allowing Pierce and special effects supervisor John P. Fulton to use less extensive appliances; in addition, Chaney would be able to deliver his performance without excessive hindrances. As the Wolf Man would be fully-clothed throughout all of his appearances, the make-up simply consisted in make-up for the face and hands, a chest appliance to enlarge the actor’s chest, and foot extensions to portray wolf-like digitigrade legs.

Despite the differences in design, the make-up application process was not very different from the one Pierce devised for Werewolf of London. With the exception of the Wolf Man’s nose, the nails and the foot extensions (boots covered with yak hair and manually-sculpted feet), Pierce’s make-up involved no moulds or pre-made appliances: every make-up application started from scratch, with yak hairs carefully laid out in order. “I put all of the hair in a little row at a time,” Pierce said. “After the hair is on, you curl it, then singe it, burn it, to [make it] look like an animal’s that’s been out in the woods. It had to be done every morning.” Every make-up application session lasted up to two and a half hours. This, combined with the intricate make-up design led to an uneasy and controversial relationship between Chaney and Pierce and an overall unpleasant experience for Chaney.

Working in tandem with Pierce, Fulton realized the film’s transformation sequences: in the first, only Larry Talbot’s feet are seen transforming into the bestial Werewolf feet; and in the finale, the dead Talbot reverts back to human form. For these key scenes, Fulton used the same technique — this time perfected — he had used for Werewolf of London: progressive stages of the make-up (always applied by Pierce, with increasing hair number and density) were photographed in identical conditions and lap-dissolved in the final film to create the illusion of a progressive transformation.

Chaney recalled the experience: “the day we did the transformations I came in at two AM. When I hit that position they would take little nails and drive them through the skin at the edge of my fingers, on both hands, so that I wouldn’t move them anymore. While I was in this position they would build a plaster cast of the back of my head. Then they would take drapes from behind me and starch them, and while they were drying them, they would take the camera and weigh it down with one ton, so that it wouldn’t quiver when people walked. They had targets for my eyes up there. Then, while I’m still in this position, they would shoot five or ten frames of film in the camera. They’d take that film out and send it to the lab. While it was there the make-up man [Pierce] would come and take the whole thing off my face, and put on a new one, only less. I’m still immobile. When the film came back from the lab they’d check me. They’d say, ‘your eye have moved a little bit, move them to the right… now your shoulder is up…’ Then they’d roll it again and shoot another 10 frames.” Despite Chaney’s varying, oftentimes exaggerated accounts, the entire process realistically took roughly 10 hours.

For more pictures of the Wolf Man, visit the Monster Gallery.

A crimson bird the size of a swan had appeared, piping its weird music to the vaulted ceiling. It had a glittering golden tail as long as a peacock’s and gleaming golden talons, which were gripping a ragged bundle.

A second later, the bird was flying straight at Harry. It dropped the ragged thing it was carrying at his feet, then landed heavily on his shoulder. As it folded its great wings, Harry looked up and saw it had a long, sharp golden beak and beady black eyes.
-J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Albus Dumbledore’s Phoenix was aptly-named after Guy Fawkes for his life cycle, which involves a periodical self-combustion. Adam Brockbank was responsible for the design of the Phoenix for the film adaptation of The Chamber of Secrets, in all of the three stages it is seen in — dying adult, hatchling, and reborn adult. Brockbank carefully researched classical illustrations of Phoenixes, as well as adequate natural reference from real birds; large birds of prey were mostly used as the base for the design — in particular, sea eagles and vultures. Brockbank also endowed the creature with an exaggerated feathery crest to give a sense of nobility.

The vulture influence was most applied in the old stage and hatchling stage — with a stretched out neck and layered wrinkles. To establish Fawkes’s feather disposition and patterns, Brockbank was provided with stock feathers from pheasants and other birds to rearrange into various compositions and layering schemes.

In regards to colour scheme, Brockbank maintained the design close to the book descriptions, with fiery tones like burned oranges and dark reds. In another reference to real birds, Fawkes’s underside is golden-coloured and bright, whereas his top is darker-coloured. A burned-out match was used for additional colour reference. Darker tones were used for the dying stage, and the hatchling stage was established to have a chick-like pink colouration mixed with the gray of the ashes.

Side-by-side comparison of Brockbank’s concepts for the young, healthy Fawkes and the dying Fawkes.

Once a final design was selected, Brockbank’s illustrations were passed over to Nick Dudman’s special effects team. Three animatronic versions of the bird were devised, one for each stage of Fawkes’s lifecycle. Dudman explained the perceived importance of a physical puppet that could interact with the actors: “computer-generated effects do the things that we physically can’t, but what we do with practical effects is create a sense of interaction that sometimes might be lost with CG.”

In the scene where Fawkes is introduced, Harry first sees the old and withered Phoenix — a full-size puppet. The mechanisms animating the creature were devised by Josh Lee and Andy Roberts. Dudman related: “the birds looked like the Terminator on the inside, they were so stuffed with gear. We had a nictitating membrane in the eye, which could drop a tear; the wings folded out, and it could cock its head and slide along the perch.”

Fawkes’s elaborately-coloured feathers were supervised by Val Jones. “Every feather was dyed and art-worked,” Dudman said. “It took months to do, and the whole place was covered in feathers; but it was a lovely thing when it was finished.”

According to Dudman, the puppets were so convincing that actor Richard Harris thought they were real birds trained for the production. He recalled: “Richard Harris came over to me and my chief Fawkes operator, Chris Barton, at one point, and told us how amazed he was by how well the bird was trained. I told Richard that Fawkes was, in essence, a puppet, but he wouldn’t believe me. So I pressed a control button, bringing Fawkes to life. Richard was absolutely gobsmacked. I don’t think I could have received higher praise.”

Concept art of the hatchling Fawkes by Adam Brockbank.

Fawkes bursts into fire in front of Harry — a combination of a practical fire effect and digital compositing by MPC — only to be reborn from his own ashes. A full-size hatchling animatronic was used for the sequence.

For later scenes, Fawkes was portrayed by a second adult animatronic — with the same mechanics as the ‘old’ version — which was combined in the Chamber scenes with a digital version provided by Framestore.

The digital effects artists met more than one challenge. The Phoenix was manually built, instead of being a refined digital scan. The digital model had to match Dudman’s practical Phoenix — a problematic process, since the puppets had not been sculpted with regard to flight, as they only had to be seen standing or sitting on a perch. Dudman said: “we built a bird with wings that were folded or only opened halfway. In hindsight, we should have constructed it in flight, as well. The CG group had a lot of trouble with it.”

Using proportions from the animatronic proved to be unfeasible. “When we pulled the wings out, it looked like a turkey,” said animation supervisor Michael Eames. “We had to devise a method to suck the body in and rescale the legs to make him more graceful. When he was in the air, we could proportion him any way we wanted; but there were shots where he landed, folded his wings, and then we cut directly to the animatronic — so he had to be recognizable as the animatronic.”

A custom system in Maya allowed the digital model to be tweaked by enlarging or shrinking its body parts separately. Adam Lucas modelled and rigged the creature. “Changing shapes is normally simple,” Eames explained, “but Fawkes is a bird, and anything we did in geometry affected the feathers — so we had to scale the feathers independently.”

Justin Martin and a software team devised a system in Houdini to match the digital feathers with those found on the puppet versions. A ‘guide hair’ established the position of the feathers, which were then generated based on parameters assigned to the hairs. Sally Goldberg, part of the crew, related: “guide hairs in the front end represented where feathers would be, and Ben White used those to groom the bird to match the animatronic. The feathers were put onto the body like layered roof tiles. Each feather, on a frame-by-frame basis, was put onto the feather below so it never intersected. If the feathers were going around a concave bend, all would sit perfectly on each other; and on a convex bend, they would thin out nicely.”

Position of the feathers was calculated for each frame of animation. Visual effects animator Mark Hodgkins explained: “the custom software would manually lift each feather, one at a time, then, using collision avoidance, project the feather down, allowing individual feathers to move and slide over each other, giving it a more complex, feathery look. It wasn’t that bad, actually. The bird was in ten sections so we could use ten machines for each frame.” Rendering of the feathers took place in the final stages of the process; custom shaders endowed them with a subtle sheen replicating the appearance of the animatronic. Actual animation of the flying Phoenix was based on footage of real birds, in particular on the flying motion of a turkey vulture and a blue macaw.

If this is dying, thought Harry, it’s not so bad. Even the pain was leaving him …

But was this dying? Instead of going black, the Chamber seemed to be coming back into focus. Harry gave his head a little shake and there was Fawkes, still resting his head on Harry’s arm. A pearly patch of tears was shining all around the wound – except that there was no wound.

‘Get away, bird,’ said Riddle’s voice suddenly. ‘Get away from him. I said, get away!’

Harry raised his head. Riddle was pointing Harry’s wand at Fawkes; there was a bang like a gun and Fawkes took flight again in a whirl of gold and scarlet.

‘Phoenix tears …’ said Riddle quietly, staring at Harry’s arm. ‘Of course … healing powers … I forgot …’

For more pictures of Fawkes, visit the Monster Gallery.

From the middle of the misty domed web, a spider the size of a small elephant emerged, very slowly. There was grey in the black of his body and legs, and each of the eyes on his ugly, pincered head was milky white. He was blind.

‘What is it?’ he said, clicking his pincers rapidly.
-J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Illustration by Adam Brockbank.

Concept artist Adam Brockbank was assigned the task to design Aragog for the film adaptation of Chamber of Secrets. After various iterations, which were based on different species of spiders, the filmmakers ultimately settled upon what was fundamentally a magnified Wolf Spider. Sculptural details were also added to enhance Aragog’s old age.

“I come from a distant land. A traveller gave me to Hagrid when I was an egg. Hagrid was only a boy, but he cared for me, hidden in a cupboard in the castle, feeding me on scraps from the table. Hagrid is my good friend, and a good man. When I was discovered, and blamed for the death of a girl, he protected me. I have lived here in the Forest ever since, where Hagrid still visits me. He even found me a wife, Mosag, and you see how our family has grown, all through Hagrid’s goodness…”

Aragog was originally going to be portrayed by a digital model, but it was ultimately decided to build a full-size puppet, with digital effects mostly delegated to create Aragog’s children. This choice not only saved budget, but provided the young actors an actual full-size Monster to react against. Nick Dudman, head of the creature effects team, related: “I’m a great believer in giving actors — especially young actors — everything you possibly can to help them react properly. This spider actually crawled out of a hole in front of the kids and talked to them — and they reacted accordingly.”

Gary Pollard sculpts Aragog.

Constructing Aragog and operating him on set proved to be the most challenging task Dudman and crew were assigned for the production — the character alone required a crew of 97 people. The spider had a 10-foot body and a 18-foot leg span and was sculpted in full-size by Gary Pollard. The body was sculpted separately from the legs.

The actual animatronic featured a steel armature, which was covered with foam latex skin. The body was constructed with a fiberglass supporting structure that covered the steel armature, and was in turn covered by the skin. Animatronic supervisor Chris Barton, aided by animatronic engineers Simon Williams and Steve Wright, devised the mechanisms animating the giant spider, whereas the electronics were assigned to Tamzine Hanks.

Aragog’s face could perform a range of detailed movements to suggest talking motion. “Its eyes, its front hairy teeth, and other bits in his face moved,” Dudman related, “they were all hooked up through a Gilderfluke computer-controlled system.” The animatronic was programmed to deliver recorded dialogue (voice actor Julian Glover’s lines) on set. “Everyone on set could hear the spider through a loudspeaker,” Dudman said. “We could literally pause the dialogue to allow Harry to say his lines, then cut in with the spider’s dialogue.”

Aragog’s legs were mechanized with aquatronics — hydraulic systems that function with water. Dudman related: “it created the gentle, quiet movement that spider legs have. It was quite creepy.” Aragog’s four front legs were puppeteered through mechanical articulated rods called waldos — which reproduced movements made by controllers — whereas the rear legs (whose tips would be seen by the camera) were manually puppeteered by crewmembers in the hole.

To animate the spider, it was pushed out to give the impression of it crawling towards Harry and Ron. “Basically, the guys moved the spider around physically by pulling its legs and pushing its body along, and whatever they did was mirrored on the set,” Dudman explained. “The front legs had to give the impression they were pulling the body out even though it was really getting pushed out. We put a little radar unit at the tip of each leg so the performers would always know when the leg made contact with the ground. Holding that position made the spider look like it was taking weight on that leg. If a leg was coming within six inches of the ground, a green light came on and when it touched the ground a red light came on. The performers also had TV monitors so they could see where the legs were going on the set.”

Once the front legs rose from the hole and touched the ground, the crew had to lift up the body. The animatronic was mounted on a pole-armed teeterboard, which had a counterweight on the other end and was buried in a hole in the set. Dudman said: “the spider was on one end and on the other end was a quarter-ton of weight, so it was steered out of the hole a bit like a camera crane.”

‘We’ll just go, then,’ Harry called desperately to Aragog, hearing leaves rustling behind him.

‘Go?’ said Aragog slowly. ‘I think not …’

‘But – but –’

‘My sons and daughters do not harm Hagrid, on my command.

But I cannot deny them fresh meat, when it wanders so willingly into our midst. Goodbye, friend of Hagrid.’

The design of Aragog’s children was simplistically reverse-engineered starting from the parent’s appearance. Dudman’s team devised 12 full-size animatronics ranging from three-foot to five-foot spiders. One of the puppets was limitedly articulated and was used for an insert shot of a spider attacking Ron from outside the car. However, the majority of them were only built to be used as on-set reference for the CGI team. “By putting any of these 12 spiders into a sequence, they could see what the spiders would look like,” Dudman said, “and what space they would take up. But the action of these spiders was too frenetic for animatronics.”

The digital spider sequences were provided by Mill Film, whose team started by scanning one of Dudman’s spiders. The scan data after various processes was imported to Maya, where Burke and Ivor Middleton began experimenting with animation studies. Burke explained: “we had two different issues: little spiders and large spiders. With the little ones, we had to deal with adapting our flocking system to give us a new library of animation functions so we could tackle a large number of shots with flexibility and have them move on the surfaces of the set. For the large ones, we had to develop the aggressive nature of the spiders.”

Middleton led a team of 17 animators in creating animation libraries of varied walking cycles — slow walking motions, creeping motions, rock climbing, running. TD supervisor Laurent Kermel developed a ‘semi-procedural’ Maya plug-in to perform crowd animation of the smaller spiders. The procedural system generated motion for a mass of particles which was then replaced with the spider models. Output from this simulation drove the animation of the spiders’ legs. He explained: Qfirst, we’d set parameters in the system that controlled speed, force, how far they could see and so forth; and then we’d set parameters that controlled the way they reacted in particular situations — for example, when they bumped into obstacles or got scared. We’d test this on a group of 10 to 20 spiders, and when we had their ‘DNA’ the way we liked it, we’d apply it either to create the entire mass of 1000 spiders or to a percentage. We could paint the areas where we wanted them to go or not go, place obstacles they would avoid or that might scare them to run away, or stop the simulation to a specific frame number to hand-animate a group of spiders, and then start it up again. Or an animator could pick one spider out of the group and animate it by hand. There were tons of tools.”

This system also created a starting point for the larger spiders, which would understandably need to be animated manually. Middleton explained: “for spiders closer in, an animator would start with the animation generated by the program and develop it further. The flocking software gave us spiders moving in a coherent fashion and helped us block out scenes — but we still had to put a lot of work into getting the size and weight and look of the motion right for the larger ones.

[to be continued with Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows]

For more pictures of Aragog and his spawn, visit the Monster Galleries:

• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Main Articles:

• Serpent of Slytherin
• Ukrainian Ironbelly

Standing in the doorway, illuminated by the shivering flames in Lupin’s hand, was a cloaked figure that towered to the ceiling. Its face was completely hidden beneath its hood. Harry’s eyes darted downward, and what he saw made his stomach contract. There was a hand protruding from the cloak and it was glistening, grayish, slimy-looking, and scabbed, like something dead that had decayed in water…

But it was visible only for a split second. As though the creature beneath the cloak sensed Harry’s gaze, the hand was suddenly with-drawn into the folds of its black cloak.
-J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

When interviewed about Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J.K. Rowling was asked whether or not the Dementors were representative of depression. “That is exactly what they are,” her reply was. “It was entirely conscious. And entirely from my own experience. Depression is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced. It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again. The absence of hope. That very deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad. Sad hurts but it’s a healthy feeling. It’s a necessary thing to feel. Depression is very different.” Rowling thus envisioned wraith-like figures that, with the ‘Dementor’s kiss’, drain people of their positive emotions and soul, leaving a living empty shell behind.

Where there should have been eyes, there was only thin, grey, scabbed skin, stretched blankly over empty sockets. But there was a mouth … a gaping, shapeless hole, sucking the air with the sound of a death-rattle.

In-keeping with the description from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the film designers conceived the Dementors as ethereal characters whose skeletal anatomy would be veiled and suggested by black robes that hung from their heads. The only innovation director Alfonso Cuarón introduced was the ability of the Dementors to fly — enabling more creative freedom in the portrayal of their motion.

Rob Bliss was responsible for the final design of the Dementors. The concept art team envisioned the character as essentially a skeleton devoid of legs, with a spine ending in a pronounced tail section replacing the coccyx — all tightly wrapped in decaying skin. The head is featureless, with a gaping lamprey-like mouth — always in line with Rowling’s description. Since the Dementors would be filmed in mostly darkly-lit scenes, the colour scheme of their bodies and robes was endowed with dark gray and black tones, in order for them to blend in their surroundings but also remain the focus of the shots without disappearing completely. For the textures of both skin and robes, the crew referenced embalmed bodies, with rotting and loose wrappings. Working in collaboration with the costume department, the creature designer also experimented with various assortments of cloth and garments that would properly convey a floating motion. Once approved, Bliss’s design of the Dementors’ naked form was translated into three-dimensional maquettes, both in 1:3 scale and full size. The small-scale maquettes were sculpted by Bliss himself and Kate Hill, whereas the full-size maquette was sculpted by Chris Fitzgerald; the sculptures were cast in silicone.

The Dementor maquette, sculpted by Kate Hill and Rob Bliss.

Cuarón’s initial idea was to bring the Dementors to life as rod puppets shot underwater to convincingly portray the floating motion of their robes. Dudman recalled. Intending to build and use full-size puppets, the team first tested the technique with third-scale puppets based on moulds of the maquettes and covered in fabric. For this purpose, underwater puppeteer Basil Twist was hired, based on his work on the Broadway show Symphonie Fantastique. Dudman recalled: “Basil Twist demonstrated moving fabric around on a stick, and we shot some film tests with our Dementor maquettes, blowing water around underwater to create waves and movement.”

Slow-motion filming and reverse shooting were also experimented with. Ultimately, however, the technique proved unfeasible. Dudman continues: Every now and then, this produced some really wonderful effects; but, most of the time, it didn’t, because it was impossible to control. There was no way we could make the movements match a live-action plate. It became obvious that the only logical way to do this was CG.”

The task of creating the digital Dementors for the film was thus assigned to Industrial Light & Magic. The third-scale Dementor maquette served as scanning reference for the digital model, which was then manually enhanced. George explained: “our lead CG modeler, Michael Koper, built all of the skeletal detail. Digital artist Tom Fejes then covered it in fabric, and we kept it very dark. Alfonso steered us toward keeping the Dementors very mysterious and spectral.”

Although discarded, the underwater puppet tests served as reference for the CG team: Cuarón selected key moments from the tests that he thought captured the intended character of the Dementors. ILM had to replicate the effect of the tests in a digital and this time controllable form. The Dementors’ lack of facial connotations dictated that their animation had to rely on body language. ILM visual effects supervisor Bill George commented: “the Dementors were the chief bad guys of the film, but they had no eyes, no face, nothing to express emotion. It all came down to body posture and the way the faric moved. One of my goals was to get the cloth simulation guys — who usually strive to simulate reality — to be more creative in how they utilized their software, turning the model upside down, turning gravity off or running simulations backwards.” Glimpses of the Dementors’ anatomy would be revealed with animated wind sources pushing fabric into the rib cage. The model were not fitted with muscle systems but instead rigged with a single cloth-simulation mesh. The full-scale maquette provided by Dudman’s team served as on-set lighting reference.

The first appearance of a Dementor is during the train sequence early on in the film. ILM animation director David Andrews said: “Steve Rawlins created animation of the skeleton coming down the corridor. Cloth [simulation] lead Steve Sauers then moved a CG wind source coming up from underneath, blowing across the character to make the ‘tendrils’ rise. We shaped the tendrils by hand to make them more dynamic, bringing them up in frame then letting them fall back down. It took that kind of frame-by-frame handcrafting on top of the simulation to create the emotional effect we needed.”

The Dementor’s kiss was conveyed with a warping digital effect. George related: “Alfonso wanted a very subdued effect. Our first soul-suck tests were way over the top. Part of my job was to learn the more organic, subtle look that Alfonso wanted.” The final soul-draning effect was achieved with a combination of particle simulation, animated shapes with projected textures, and paint effects.

Visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett noted Cuarón’s deliberate downplayed focus on the creatures: “Alfonso wanted to underplay them in a natural way, without making a big spectacle of every effects shot. I’ve worked on movies where we’ve been asked to always see the creature as big as possible, and always in focus. But when we talked about adding more detail to the Dementors, for example, Alfonso insisted: ‘no, let’s just make it dark and shadowy. We don’t have to see every detail all the time.’ There’s a lot to be said for not having the effects jump out at you.”

For more pictures of the Dementors, visit the Monster Gallery.

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Main Articles:

• The Dementors
• Buckbeak
• Lupin

Trotting towards them were a dozen of the most bizarre creatures Harry had ever seen.

They had the bodies, hind legs and tails of horses, but the front legs, wings and heads of what seemed to be giant eagles, with cruel, steel-coloured beaks and large, brilliantly orange eyes. The talons on their front legs were half a foot long and deadly-looking. Each of the beasts had a thick leather collar around its neck, which was attached to a long chain, and the ends of all of these were held in the vast hands of Hagrid, who came jogging into the paddock behind the creatures.

-J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

The idea of Hippogriff — a fantastic hybrid with the front half of an eagle and the hind half of a horse — can be traced back to Greek and Latin mythology — the offspring of a mare and a griffin (hence its name). Although the film version of Prisoner of Azkaban would excise the Hippogriff pack described in the novel for reasons of time and budget, it still would have to show Buckbeak — a key element of the story. The creature designers of the project thus had to create a design that would result convincing on screen, despite the absurd quality of the concept. Nick Dudman, head of the creature effects crew, explained: “a hippogriff is an off-shoot of the ancient Greek mythological idea of chopping up animals and sticking different parts together. The logic was insane, and we had to tread a very fine line between cartoon and real life.”

Wayne Barlowe’s early Buckbeak idea, featuring multiple wings and three-hooved hind legs.

Designing Buckbeak was a task that mainly relied on artistic interpretation. Early concept art by Wayne Barlowe featured multiple wings, as well as smaller toes with hooves on the hind legs and other unusual details. This template was channeled by Dermot Power, who was the key artist in the design process — finalizing the design and providing a colour scheme for it. The golden eagle served as the main reference for the Hippogriff’s profile.

Dermot Power’s Buckbeak concepts.

Veterinarians and physiologists were also consulted to ensure that the creature had realistic wing proportions in relation to the rest of its body. The design, once finalized, was then translated into a maquette. “Chris Fitzgerald did a great job sculpting the maquette from Dermot Power’s design,” Dudman said. “It then became a case of processing the design, scaling it up and adding some 30.000 feathers.”

Dudman’s team built three full-scale animatronic versions of Buckbeak for the film — portraying the creature respectively in standing, rearing, and lying down positions. Much like Fawkes for the previous film, the feather work for the practical version of Buckbeak was helmed by Val Jones — who mainly used chicken and goose feathers obtained from the food industry, with the larger ones taken from preserved swan carcasses. Each feather was sterilized, sorted, and bulk-dyed manually, and then airbrushed by hand. The primary wing feathers were instead created wit vacuformed, flocked and airbrushed plastic feather shapes. The feathers were then manually glued to a Powernet jacket, sewn to the puppet’s skin (tailored lycra), laid over internal mechanisms and then fastened with velcro and snap fittings.

The animatronics were rigged with an aquatronic system and could perform a wide range of motion. The head was computer-controlled. The primary wing feathers were rigged to cables and mechanized to splay as the wings opened and unfolded; the standing hippogriff could spread its wings, and could move its right foreleg and left hind leg, as well as curl its claws. Up to ten puppeteers were needed to operate each one of the animatronics. For scenes set in Hagrid’s property, the lying-down animatronic was mounted on rails, allowing it to slide and be stored inside a tent overnight. Climatic conditions on location (raining, hailing) made shooting the hippogriff extremely difficult — with Val Jones having to clean the feathers from mud and excess water.

Concurrent to the construction of the puppets was the development of a digital version of Buckbeak, based on Power’s art and stills of the animatronics during construction. The digital hippogriff was initially intended to be used for walking, throtting and flight scenes. The task was assigned to Framestore (the same visual effects company behind the digital Basilisk for the second film), with a team led by Tim Burke.

Animation supervisor Michael Eames described the complexity of the process: “putting a bird’s head on top of a horse’s body brought up issues of bone structure and anatomy. Birds are extremely light, and their bone structure is designed for flight. We took some license to make the head move in a birdlike fashion, because a creature of that size probably wouldn’t be able to move that fast. More importantly, Alfonso wanted Buckbeak to be like a sloppy teenager — animalistic, with a slightly wild side. But when Buckbeak took to the air, he became a graceful and majestic beast that was completely in control of his own direction and power.”

The practical Buckbeak shot onset…

…was replaced with Framestore’s digital version.

Ultimately, in fact, the animatronic hippogriffs only appeared in two shots, lying down in Hagrid’s pumpkin patch. Otherwise, they only served as on-set lighting and interaction reference. Development of the digital version of the creature mainly involved devising a realistic feather system able to interact with characters and wind resistance. Instead of using a surface with texture maps, the visual effects team decided to model the feathers manually. Development of the feather system began with the deconstruction of the structure of an actual bird feather — from rachis, to barbs, to barbules. Simulation of barbules was only used when the hippogriff was seen in extreme close-up. About 16.300 feathers (with 6.7 million individual barbs) were applied on the digital hippogriff’s skin, which was operated by a proprietary muscle system developed in Maya to portray realistic jiggle in the skin.

Animation of the wings posed particular issues in that regard, having to employ complex interactions between muscles and feathers. Lomax related: “we wanted a fully opening and closing wing without any cheating. Felix Balbas, our character rigging supervisor, came up with a way of ensuring that primary and secondary wing feathers didn’t intersect as the wings went from fully open to fully closed.” The rig prevented intersections in flattened primary feathers, and a specific program developed for the project resolved intersections and compressed feathers against each other in the closed configuration of the wing.

The wing feathers were also scalable, and this function was used when Buckbeak had to take flight. “A 21-foot wingspan just didn’t look magnificent enough, so we settled on a 28-foot open wing,” said Lomax, “but the closed wing extended too far beyond the hippogriff’s back, so we scaled the feathers down as the wings closed.” Buckbeak’s movements were otherwise based on studies of footage of flying eagles, as well as walking and galloping horses.

For scenes of Harry riding Buckbeak, Daniel Radcliffe was filmed against bluescreen on a M-rig (developed for the Dinotopia miniseries) that physically represented Buckbeak’s back. The rig was refined for the project, now providing a flexible point of contact on an articulated shape based on castings of the Dudman team’s puppets. Framestore artists led animation into the M-rig, allowing freedom to preview movements and create animation changes in real time. A new system of render passes was also employed. “Rather than writing traditional beauty and shadow passes for Render-Man,” Lomax said, “Andy King, our lighting supervisor, constructed shaders to output translucency, occlusion, lighting, form and environment passes, breaking each render inlo 54 components –which we then reconstructed in Shake.”

‘Now, firs’ thing yeh gotta know abou’ Hippogriffs is they’re proud,’ said Hagrid. ‘Easily offended, Hippogriffs are. Don’t never insult one, ’cause it might be the last thing yeh do.’

For more pictures of Buckbeak, visit the Monster Gallery.

There was a terrible snarling noise. Lupin’s head was lengthening. So was his body. His shoulders were hunching. Hair was sprouting visibly on his face and hands, which were curling into clawed paws.

-J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

J.K. Rowling implemented lycanthropy in her Harry Potter novels as a metaphor for real world illnesses that are feared and cause those who carry them to be stigmatized. “Lupin’s condition of lycanthropy (being a werewolf) was a metaphor for those illnesses that carry a stigma,” the author said, “like HIV and AIDS. All kinds of superstitions seem to surround blood-borne conditions, probably due to taboos surro unding blood itself. The wizarding community is as prone to hysteria and prejudice as the Muggle one, and the character of Lupin gave me a chance to examine those attitudes.”

For the film adaptation of Prisoner of Azkaban, director Alfonso Cuarón made this concept the key to the visual portrayal of Lupin and his Werewolf form; at the same time, he deliberately intended to stray from Rowling’s relatively simplistic depiction of a Werewolf as a large wolf with subtle human traits, instead aiming for a hybrid of man and wolf — an idea that would allow more freedom in visual design.

The concept of lycanthropy as a sickness was central to the conception of the Werewolf; Cuarón intended the endow the creature with emotional gravitas and sadness. To that end, creature designer Wayne Barlowe conceived the Monster as a gangly, emaciated creature with distorted proportions — giving it a hunched back, long and thin limbs, and a sickly, almost skeletal head. The Werewolf is also mostly hairless — enhancing the thinness of its form — with sparse coverings of light hair on its body. Barlowe’s renderings were channeled by Rob Bliss and Adam Brockbank, who took over the design and finalized it — making it less hairy and giving it a more skeletal appearance.

Early ideas for the transformation included more gruesome details that were ultimately discarded, such as cheeks ripping apart. This was also conveyed in the make-up David Thewlis wore on set, but was later replaced with a digital transition head. The in-film transformation begins with a two-stage make-up and then progresses through animatronics and CGI. Contact lenses, teeth and facial prosthetics at the corners of Thewlis’s mouth to suggest Lupin’s mouth splitting back to his skull. A cable-controlled back harness deformed Lupin’s spine as his jacket split apart, unvealing the hunched back and shoulder blades. Make-up bladders applied on the neck were inflated in a subtle manner. Close-up shots of Lupin’s claws bursting through fingertips and his legs elongating into a wolf-like configuration were photographed afterwards as insert shots.

The final stage of Lupin’s transformation, with his head finally changing into the Werewolf’s, was achieved with digital effects handled by MPC. This key shot began with a cyberscan of the actor, tracked to a CG body and then selectively deformed. CG supervisor Simon Clutterbuck remarked: “Alfonso was keen to have a second of David Thewlis before he changed. We slowed the shot to half speed, tracked in our CG puppet and match-animated it to David Thewlis in the shot.” The hair was digitally replaced with a Delilah simulation, animating the hair to spread and hrow as the head changed, and also animated shadrs to change the skin to darker shades.

Despite the Werewolf’s clearly inhuman proportions, Cuarón intended to bring the Werewolf to life through a combination of a performer in a creature suit and a CGI version of the character, with the majority of the shots achieved with the former and wide ambulatory shots performed with the latter. Dudman recalled: “we maquetted the Werewolf in its ideal form, then decided how we might cmpromise to accommodate a performer in a suit — but we didn’t compromise enough. By fighting to keep the design as near to the concept as possible, we created a suit that looked great but was a nightmare to perform in.”

Werewolf suits were constructed to fit two performers — Marnix Van Der Broek (a Belgian ballet dancer) and Spencer Wilding (English kickboxer) — both cast for their tall, muscular and slender bodies. The foam latex suits were skin-tight and featured a neck extension (with eyeholes) ending in a fully animatronic radio-controlled head, as well as arm and leg extensions. When the performer threw his weight forward, he rose up on the stilts, transferring the weight to his shins. The head of the Werewolf was attached to a weight-supporting spine that distributed the weight around the hips and shoulders.

Werewolf tests and rehearsals were initially successful, but those results could not be replicated on the hilltop set where the climactic scene had to be shot. “We were fine until we got to the set,” Dudman related. “With the combination of claustrophobia and the position they were held in, the performers could do what they were asked to do, but not with grace. In retrospect, we pushed it further than we should have. It taught me that there is no good in saying, ‘stick to the original concept.’ What I should have said at the beginning was, ‘either this is purely CG, or we make compromises.'”

The only practical Werewolf shot surviving in the final cut of the film is a quick over-the-shoulder shot — a decision not finalized until post-production, because back-up clean plates without the Werewolf suits were also shot. This allowed MPC to insert the revised effects strategy — an entirely digital creature — without excessive rotoscoping difficulties. The digital Werewolf required muscle system research and development. Clutterbuck explained: “we implemented a paper on ‘multi-weight enveloping’ written by ILM. It put the Werewolf through an exercise routine, moving him through 1200 unique poses. The system learned the positions and we could tweak them if we weren’t happy with deformations. This built up a big library of poses. Animators could move the model around, and the system would fill the gaps, interpolating poses.” The Werewolf was animated with muscle animation, fur dynamics and digital spit.

For more pictures of Lupin’s Werewolf form, visit the Monster Gallery.

Main Articles:

• Aragog
• Fawkes

At this April’s Romics Comic Con — held as usual in Fiera di Roma — I had the great chance to attend a tribute gallery to Carlo Rambaldi, organized by his children. The exhibition was focused on Carlo’s most well known special effects work — E.T: The Extraterrestrial, Alien, and the 1976 King Kong — and featured a painted E.T. sculpture and a replica of King Kong’s hand (mechanized to grab people!), as well as several prints of photographs of Carlo’s work on said films, and of magazine pages with articles on them.

The prints included Carlo’s extensive concept art for E.T. — the various expressions of the character, as well as concepts for the animatronic and suit versions of the alien and how they would implement the various mechanisms animating E.T.. There were also Carlo’s anatomical sketches of the alien’s skeleton and musculature. The Alien stills depicted Carlo’s full-size animatronic heads built for the film (read more here) during the construction process; one of the heads currently resides at the Giger Museum in Gruyeres. The King Kong photographs portrayed the construction of the King Kong suit’s head, the full-size hands, and the full-size ‘Robot Kong’; Carlo’s sketches and paintings of King Kong’s face were also shown.

The tribute was there in occasion of E.T.‘s 35th anniversary, as well as to promote the work of the Carlo Rambaldi Cultural Foundation, which is trying to preserve the memory of the maestro’s effects work in the form of a museum. At the exhibition I met Carlo’s daughter, Daniela Rambaldi! A true honour. She told me that the museum, which is going to be in Carlo’s hometown, Vigarano Mainarda, is going to feature material from most of the films Carlo has worked on. I chimed in, specifically asking if the creatures from Dune and Possession (my favourite effects of his along with the Alien animatronic head) are going to be there, and she confirmed that those are going to be covered as well. The kind woman also left me with a signed postmark exclusive to the Con.

Daniela Rambaldi (center) and Leonardo Cruciano (right) and other guests at the Carlo Rambaldi panel.

The event continued in the evening, with a special panel dedicated to Carlo’s legacy: his film work from the first assignments to E.T., as well as the still pulsating importance of practical effects in today’s film industry. One of the guests was Leonardo Cruciano — key concept artist and special effects artist of Makinarium, one of the Italian special effects houses keeping the art of practical effects alive. The artists at Makinarium at large were inspired by Carlo’s iconic effects work. I waited patiently and, after the panel, I had the great honour to meet him and shake hands with him. Being a great enthusiast of Makinarium’s work on Tale of Tales (2015), I asked Mr. Cruciano if the sea monster design had been inspired by an Axolotl. “That was indeed the inspiration,” he told me. “I initially wanted to go beyond that, more ‘out there’, since it was a sea creature — but director Matteo Garrone wanted to maintain a simpler direction, which is the one you eventually see in the film.”

Leonardo Cruciano’s concept art of the Tale of Tales sea monster.

You can visit the Carlo Rambaldi Cultural Foundation’s Official Website, as well as donate towards their cause and contribute to the funding for the museum. Of course, once the museum is open to the public, you can expect a full report from me!

While you are here, take a tour in Makinarium’s Official Website and see their wonderful special effects creations for Tale of Tales and other projects.

A cluster of crude stone dwellings stained with algae loomed suddenly out of the gloom on all sides. Here and there at the dark windows, Harry saw faces… faces that bore no resemblance at all to the painting of the mermaid in the prefects’ bathroom…

The merpeople had grayish skin and long, wild, dark green hair. Their eyes were yellow, as were their broken teeth, and they wore thick ropes of pebbles around their necks. They leered at Harry as he swam past; one or two of them emerged from their caves to watch him better, their powerful, silver fish tails beating the water, spears clutched in their hands.
-J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

In the Harry Potter novels, the Merpeople and the Grindylows are not the only denizens of the Hogwarts lake — a giant squid also resides there, but remained excised from all films. The creature was briefly considered for a cameo in Prisoner of Azkaban (during the Buckbeak flight sequence), being portrayed in early storyboards for the sequence — but was cut from the final version of the film for reasons of time and budget.

Compared to the Goblet of Fire novel, the second task scene in the film adaptation excises some details that showcased the culture of the Merpeople — such as large sculptures — and dialogue sequences, instead opting for a quicker-paced scene. Designwise, the Merpeople were assigned to Adam Brockbank: they went through several different iterations — some remaining close to the novel description and others leaning more towards animal-like anatomy. The latter direction was maintained as the design process progressed: the filmmakers opted for creatures that would organically meld fish and human qualities, instead of a human torso with a fish tail. Sturgeons served as key reference for the designs — for textures, scales, and proportions. Various options were considered for the Merpeople’s hair — including octopus-like tentacles. The final design featured sea anemone-like hair and humanoid anatomy with fish-like facial connotations, as well as a scythe-like fish tail based on tunas.

With the final design approved, it was sculpted into a series of reference maquettes that served as the base for the creation of the digital model that Framestore CFC used to bring the creatures to life. Creation of the Merpeople and Grindylows was supervised by David Lomax. The translucent, slimy appearance of their skin was resolved with the development of specific shaders that endowed them with subsurface scattering. “This aspect of the creatures was tricky to pull off as something slimy no longer looks slimy underwater,” said Tim Webber, Framestore FX supervisor.

The Merpeople were animated in what was one of the first examples of a wholly computer-generated underwater environment. The creatures’ bodies were animated manually, whereas the hair and the fins were animated procedurally. “We added a lot of control tools to make sure the hair didn’t flatten whenever a mermaid was swimming fast,” Webber said. “It included generating extra turbulence to keep it looking snake-like and sinuous.”

Harry twisted his body around and saw a grindylow, a small, horned water demon, poking out of the weed, its long fingers clutched tightly around Harry’s leg, its pointed fangs bared – Harry stuck his webbed hand quickly inside his robes and fumbled for his wand. By the time he had grasped it, two more grindylows had risen out of the weed, had seized handfuls of Harry’s robes, and were attempting to drag him down.

The notion of Grindylows stems from Northern English lore; Rowling’s description was very vague, offering the creature designers of the film production wide creative freedom in their portrayal. Design ideas were most varied, ranging from frog-like to angler-like iterations, imp-like or goblin-like bodies, and variations with hybrid anatomy — torsos merged with fish-like tails, or tentacles. Eventually, the direction taken by the design team was the concept of “a cross between a nasty child and an octopus,” with a vaguely humanoid head (complete with piranha-like rows of teeth), torso and arms, ending in a lower body with a proportionally large paunch and an array of cephalopod-like tentacles.

Once the design was selected, it was translated into three-dimensional fiberglass maquettes, which were then scanned to begin the creation of the digital model. Single Grindylows were animated manually, with challenges offered by their unique anatomy. Webbe related: “each Grindylow had an overall ‘squirty’ movement. We controlled each tentacle using dynamics and muscle systems to make it feel fleshy. It was a rigging challenge because the top half had a skeleton, but the bottom half could squash and stretch.”

The Grindylow digital model.

Certain sequences called for swarms of the creatures attacking Harry; to that end, Framestore artists used the in-house ‘Choreographer’ animation system, which enabled them to create the frenzied flocking motion of the Grindylow swarms. Webber explained: “we couldn’t use a crowd system because we wanted control over each creature; and so we hand-animated each character in Choreographer. We broke Grindylows into layers to wrap them around Harry in the composite, then rendered them mostly in one go.”

For more pictures of the Merpeople and Grindylows, visit the Monster Gallery.

The coaches were no longer horseless. There were creatures standing between the carriage shafts. If he had had to give them a name, he supposed he would have called them horses, though there was something reptilian about them, too. They were completely fleshless, their black coats clinging to their skeletons, of which every bone was visible. Their heads were dragonish, and their pupil-less eyes white and staring. Wings sprouted from each wither – vast, black leathery wings that looked as though they ought to belong to giant bats. Standing still and quiet in the gathering gloom, the creatures looked eerie and sinister.
-J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

For the film adaptation of The Order of the Phoenix, creature designer Robert Bliss maintained his Thestral concepts very close to the book descriptions — endowing a horse skeleton with tightly-wrapped skin, a beak, and membranous bat-like wings. The final film design eventually excised the fangs and manes the animals had in the novel — in order to ease aesthetic integrity. Creating the baby Thestrals was instead a matter of reverse-engineering the main design, with appropriate reference from foals.

From the selected design, sculptors Kate Hill and Julian Murray fashioned a small-scale maquette and a full-size sculpture of both the baby and adult Thestrals, producing wing and body configurations separately. Full-size models were created based on moulds of the maquettes and painted gray. “There was some question if we needed to do a paint job,” explained creature effects supervisor Nick Dudman. “Thestrals were supposed to be jet black, but if we had just painted them black they would not have looked real. We decided to produce a painted Thestral that was paler than the finished Thestral, showing patterning, veins and shading. The theory was that Stuart Craig could art-direct the subtleties, and then ILM could make the creature as dark as they liked.” The full-size maquettes were digitally scanned to obtain rough digital models that were then refined manually. Reference photographs were also taken.

The Thestrals were brought to the screen as entirely digital creatures, handled by Industrial Light & Magic. The creation of the digital Thestral in Maya was overseen by character rigging supervisor Eric Wong, and went beyond making a single model: two distinct models, one of the skeleton and one of the fully-fleshed animal were produced, highlighting the emaciated appearance of the creatures. “We typically just build a shell and then use shapes to simulate muscles and fat underneath,” said Tim Alexander, visual effects supervisor, “but in this case, we built the outer shell and also the inner pieces, the bones, and ribs for the skin to slide against.” He explained further: “the Thestral was an interesting creature to work on, due to its unique design. We first scanned a full size maquette that production had sent to us, and used the point cloud to model the geometry. We actually had to build two models, which was pretty unusual. Since the creature is basically skin and bones, it was very important for the skin to slide against the bones. So, using Maya, we built a standard model that represented the outer surfaces, and a high-resolution bone structure for the surfaces underneath. We utilized ZBrush to add a lot of details on that geometry.”

The modelling crew for the Thestrals was led by Ken Bryan. “Lana Lan, one of our modelers, built all the shapes and took the Thestral all the way through modeling, painting, and lighting,” said Alexander. “Ken did the same thing for a baby Thestral — modeled and textured it, but someone else lit it. We had the luxury of having enough time for them to do that.”

The Thestrals were animated through keyframe, with appropriate skin simulation. Subsurface scattering endowed the skin with a realistic semi-opaque quality on the body and translucent effect on the wing membranes. In order for the skin to slide over the bones and muscles convincingly, character rigging supervisor Eric Wong developed within Zeno (a multi-purpose CGI software) a PhysBam system that allowed to connect the skin layer to the skeleton underneath. The system attracted the skin to the surface, and at the same time allowed it to slide over the bones. Animation thus proved most difficult in concave spaces where the skin had to be It proved tricky for concave spaces where the skin had to be suctioned in while still sliding over it.”We used elephant textures to create wrinkles in the surface, then made it look glossy using subsurface scattering and indirect radiosity-style lighting.”

Depending on the specific movement, animation would either have to be increased or dialled back. “Sometimes, delicate movements in the keyframe animation would be lost through the simulation,” Alexander explained. “Depending on the shot, we would then either increase the animation, so that it read more through the simulation, or dial the simulation out of the area.” The wings were less problematic, as a part of the ILM crew had animated Saphira the dragon from Eragon about two years before they tackled the Thestrals. The gathered knowledge eased the animation of the creatures’ wings.

Walking cycles and animation tests were developed directly into forest environments to help define the Thestrals’ mood and stature as characters. Steve Rawlins, part of the crew, said: “the director wanted the Thestral to be quite elegant and majestic. That was tricky because we were essentially pulling a skeleton around with all the anatomy exposed, so it became very important to get all the musculature working. We builty a library of shapes that allowed muscles to fire and tense as the legs picked up and set back down. What really helped sell the believability was the way the scapula slid up and down and, when the Thestral’s foot hit the ground, all the weight fell into that area. That gave the creature a great sense of mass and helped drive the skin simulations.”

One of the challenges the digital effects team faced was to make the Thestrals — emaciated things with a monstrous appearance — look benign as well as realistic. “In terms of animation, the main goal was to make the Thestrals seem like peaceful creatures,” Alexander explained. “When Harry sees them hanging out by the water, the director wanted it to feel like a National Geographic episode.” Using reference footage of horses, animators gave the Thestrals natural motions, like little muscle flicks.

The inclusion of a baby Thestral was requested by the director to enhance the natural quality of the creatures. “David Yates wanted audiences to see that Thestrals were not exhumed living-dead creatures,” observed Rawlins. “He wanted to show that they bred and had young, so he came up with this wildlife documentary scene with the youngster.” The animation of the baby Thestral reaching the piece of meat thrown at it on the ground was based on a drinking giraffe, with the forelimbs put at an angle. For flight scenes of the third act of the film, the ILM crew used a similar approach to the Buckbeak flight scenes Framestore had provided for Prisoner of Azkaban, although obviously refined technologically. The actors were filmed riding motion control rigs, which were then replaced with the digital Thestrals.

“When you’re working on films about a fantasy world, it would be easy to stray into something that’s not believable,” concluded effects artist Tim Burke. “We want people to believe in these creatures. If they see Thestrals walking through the forest and think they’re real, we’ve all done our job.”

For more pictures of the Thestrals, visit the Monster Gallery.

Main Articles:

• The Dementors
• Thestrals

A gigantic dragon was tethered to the ground in front of them, barring access to four or five of the deepest vaults in the place. The beast’s scales had turned pale and flaky during its long incarceration under the ground, its eyes were milkily pink; both rear legs bore heavy cuffs from which chains led to enormous pegs driven deep into the rocky floor. Its great spiked wings, folded close to its body, would have filled the chamber if it spread them, and when it turned its ugly head toward them, it roared with a noise that made the rock tremble, opened its mouth, and spat a jet of fire that sent them running back up the passageway.

-J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

The Ukrainian Ironbelly in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (whose species name was actually not mentioned in the novel) was a violently mistreated, unhealthy animal, subject to imprisonment and torture by the goblins. The concept of animal abuse applied to a dragon became the key element of its characterization in the film adaptation, on both a design and animation level. Visual effects supervisor Tim Burke related: “this dragon had been underground all its life and very badly treated. It was important for David Yates that this came across in the dragon’s character, so the audience would have empathy for it.” Visual effects supervisor David Vickery further elaborated: “Tim Burke envisaged the creature as an emaciated, malnourished, mistreated wild animal and David Yates insistent that the audience needed to emote with the creature – to sympathise with it but at the same time be terrified of it.”

Early concept keyframe by Karl Simon.

Concept iterations of the dragon were handled by several artists, with the bulk of the design established by Paul Catling. The concepts initially explored a variety of different looks, but eventually dialled back to a more faithful rendition of the novel description; what shifted from version to version were the animals used as the base for the anatomy of the head and other body parts, as well as the texture and size of the scaly covering. Eventually, the design steered towards an elegant configuration with a crown of thin horns on the head and a long, beaked snout. A number of body wound and disfiguration designs were also explored and added to the skin to highlight the unhealthy state of the dragon.

Ironbelly concept by Paul Catling.

The art department then supplied the concept art work to Double Negative, whose crew dedicated to the creation of the dragon was ultimately composed by up to 100 members — lighting artists, creature effects technical directors, compositors, matchmove and rotoscope artists. The dragon was actually one of the first portions of the digital effects to begin being worked on. “Some of the first concept images we were given for The Deathly Hallows Part II were of the dragon,” said visual effects supervisor David Vickery. “They depicted an emaciated yet feral looking animal, sprawling in a dank and cavernous environment.” Conceptual designers Kristin Stolpe and Andy Warren further developed the dragon design, crafting a series of models in Maya, Photoshop texture studies and Mudbox sculptures using the art department concepts as reference. “At this early stage the creature went through a lot of changes,” Vickery related. “We designed shackles, muzzles and harnesses that could be used to restrain the creature and painted high res textures to show how the dragon could be wounded, scarred and disfigured. There were hundreds of subtle tweaks and variations made to the design of the creature during this phase.”

Stolpe and Warren’s renderings were used as the base reference for the construction of the digital dragon, handled by Rick Leary’s modelling team. As the dragon had only been visualized in two-dimensional renderings up to that point, it was crucial to make its appearance adapt to scrutinization from all angles. “Individual still images often give you a false impression of an object’s shape,” Vickery related. “When you look around that same object in 3D it suddenly looks very different. We wanted to get the creature modelled as soon as possible to avoid this and really start to understand its from from all angles.”

Lead character rigger Tom Bracht and creature lead Gavin Harrison were responsible for the simulation of the dragon’s emaciated quality, achieved with a combination of layered dynamic simulations (which also included a vein layer) and a muscle rig system built in Double Negative’s rigging tools. “We had Creature technical directors scripting lots of new pipeline tools to handle the many layers of cloth, muscle, bone, skin and tendon simulations we knew would be required to create a convincing animal,” Vickery said. He also explained that “we had to subdivide parts of the creature rig so that we could employ different simulation techniques on separate parts of the dragon’s anatomy. We utilized the dragon’s skeleton as a sculpt deformer. As the dragon breathed, her ribs would heave, her muscles and tendons would flex, and her skin would slide over different portions of her body to different degrees.”

For the actual animation, Burke provided Double Negative animation supervisor Chris Lentz with reference footage of rescue dogs and Russian circus bears. Much like its design, the behaviour of the Ironbelly had to reflect its condition of an abused animal. “The body language was so apparent in the way these animals held themselves,” Burke said, “their posture, and their eyes. We showed that in the dragon when the goblins use the clankers. This creature has been taught to fear the noise — a bit like Pavlov’s dog — and so it’s cowering and terrified.”

Scenes with Harry and his friends on the dragon’s back were the biggest technical challenge relating to the dragon effects. “Getting the lead characters to sit convincingly on the back of the dragon was a massive technical challenge for us,” Vickery commented. “We really wanted to avoid the slow grinding mechanical feel that you often get when humans have to ride or interact with large imaginary creatures.” John Richardson’s mechanical effects team devised a practical interactive section of the dragon’s back that the actors could ride on a motion control base. Vickery recalled: “we provided John Richardson with our finished Maya model of the dragon and he used this to CNC-machine a 1:1 scale 12 foot sculpt of part of the dragon’s back. Nick Dudman then used this to create a flexible foam latex skin that would form the creature’s hide whilst John Richardson built a mechanical rig to control its movement. The rig had pneumatic rams to drive the dragon’s shoulders up and down, twist the neck and spine in three places and lift the top of the tail.”

The rig was controlled by digital animation supplied by the animators. “John detailed the components of his rig and we built our own digital version of it and constrained it to our 3D dragon in Maya,” Vickery said. “Our Lead creature technical directors Gavin Harrison and Stuart Love wrote a series of tools that allowed us to extract our previs animation and use the data to drive John’s mechanical rig. We could animate the creature in Maya, export the data and see the mechanical rig do the same movements on set but this time with the actors on the back!!”

The practical limits of the rig dictated specific shooting adaptations, such as lower frame rates for certain shots. Vickery said: “the rig itself had a pretty good range of motion but was so heavy that it was never going to achieve the speeds we were seeing in our dragon previs. We had to adapt our shooting methods for each shot to make sure we got the most out of the rig. Some shots were filmed at 18fps and re-sped to make the dragon back appear to move faster.” The rig was then replaced with the digital dragon, composited into the shots. Certain sequences also implemented digital doubles of the actors.

At least we’ve still got Bogrod…

…that was unfortunate.

For scenes where the Ironbelly breathes fire, Double Negative effects animation supervisor Alexander Seaman used footage of John Richardson’s pyrotechnic effects that had been devised for the Hungarian Horntail as reference, and created digital fluid flame effects.

The dragon finally breaks free from imprisonment, and rests perched on top of the buildings — breathing slowly. “David Yates wanted this to be the first time we could really scrutinize the beauty of the dragon restored to her former glory,” Vickery related. “There was some incredible work in the skin and muscle deformers. As it spreads its wings, we used Maya nCloth simulations to create sag and dynamic flutter in the wing membranes. We broke that into separate meshes because it was so high-resolution, then ran nCloth on the fingers and the wing tips and reintegrated that into the creature body.” Large flying birds such as Albatrosses were used as reference for both the stumbling take-off and the flight scenes.

Goblins and wizards shrieked and ran for cover, and finally the dragon had room to stretch its wings: Turning its horned head toward the cool outside air it could smell beyond the entrance, it took off, and with Harry, Ron, and Hermione still clinging to its back, it forced its way through the metal doors, leaving them buckled and hanging from their hinges, as it staggered into Diagon Alley and launched itself into the sky.

For more pictures of the Ukrainian Ironbelly, visit the Monster Gallery.