Of the many fearsome beasts and monsters that roam our land, there is none more curious or more deadly than the Basilisk, known also as the King of Serpents.

Joanne Rowling’s Harry Potter series began as a single novel, published in 1997. Its astounding, unexpected success spawned a total of 6 sequels, each with its own theatrical adaptation (with the last chapter, The Deathly Hallows, receiving a two-parter treatment). Despite the overwhelming quantity of Monsters scattered throughout the novels (and films), only one of the stories took the basic narrative curve of an actual Monster Novel or Movie*: The Chamber of Secrets, published as a novel in 1998 and adapted into a film in 2002. In the second chapter of the series, in fact, the plot is centered around petrified bodies and the announcement of the coming of Slytherin’s heir — who unleashes a Horror from a secret Chamber. A Creature whose stare is deadly: the Basilisk.

Like the sheer majority of the Monsters featured in the series, the Basilisk is based on the homonim legendary animal. Spread across European History (with references even from Leonardo da Vinci in his bestiary), the name ‘Basilisk’ can be dated back to the Bible. Latin author Pliny the Elder was, however, one of the first sources to write a very detailed description of this being in his encyclopedia Naturalis Historia, published in 77-79 AD. Here, the Basilisk is described as a small Serpent of about 70 centimeters. The reptile produces such massive quantities of venom that it leaves a trail of the substance wherever it slithers. In addition, the stare of the Basilisk is lethal, much like that of another legendary animal — labeled as the Catoplebas. Pliny’s description is as follows:

“There is the same power [the deadly stare] also in the serpent called the Basilisk. It is produced in the province of Cyrene, being not more than twelve fingers in length. It has a white spot on the head, strongly resembling a sort of a diadem. When it hisses, all the other serpents fly from it: and it does not advance its body, like the others, by a succession of folds, but moves along upright and erect upon the middle. It destroys all shrubs, not only by its contact, but those even that it has breathed upon; it burns up all the grass too, and breaks the stones, so tremendous is its noxious influence. It was formerly a general belief that if a man on horseback killed one of these animals with a spear, the poison would run up the weapon and kill, not only the rider, but the horse as well. To this dreadful Monster the crow of a rooster is fatal, a thing that has been tried with success, for kings have often desired to see its body when killed; so true is it that it has pleased Nature that there should be nothing without its antidote. The animal is thrown into the hole of the Basilisk, which is easily known from the soil around it being infected. The weasel destroys the Basilisk by its odour, but dies itself in this struggle of nature against its own self.”

Tradition progressively associated the Basilisk with roosters and mythical animals linked with them, among which the Cockatrice. The traditions regarding these Monsters ‘melded’: as such, the deadly snake from time to time acquired the head, legs (sometimes more than two) and wings of a rooster; in addition, for a Basilisk to be born, its egg — a common snake egg — was to be hatched by a rooster. Other characteristics, including a varying size and the ability to breath fire (derived, most probably, from Dragons), were added in later times.

Original concept art.

Joanne Rowling in the novel combined various traditions; she did not portray the Basilisk very detailedly, and did not go farther than describing it as a considerably large Serpent of unidentified length or size, with “yellow eyes” (a key feature) and “fangs as long as his [Harry's] sword.” The same went for the script for the film adaptation, allowing considerable creative liberties on the actual design of the Monster. Curiously enough, Rowling’s Basilisk did not seem to be able to locate Harry by tracing his heat signatures, or by actually smelling his presence — traits common to most Ophids. Instead, it relied mainly on sight, and sound (as demonstrated when Harry throws a rock away from him and the Basilisk follows that sound) when blinded.

Paul Catling, the main designer for most supernatural characters and Monsters in the Harry Potter film series, conceived the appearence of the Basilisk featured in the film adaptation of The Chamber of Secrets. The beastly design features a general Snake-like configuration, with other reptilian characteristics — such as ostheoderms and thorns scattered across its scaly body, and many design aspects reminescent of Dragons (the head most evidently).

John Coppinger and Graham High add some touches to the full-size sculpture.

Nick Dudman and his special effects team collaborated on all of the Harry Potter films, and took on the duty to bring to the screen a practical Basilisk. Gary Pollard led the creation of the full-size sculpture — which would be the base for the moulds for the skin. The interior of the Monster’s mouth was sculpted and moulded separately from the rest of the body. Astrig Akseralian was the lead painter for the Basilisk and oversaw the whole process. The skin was moulded in foam latex, and actually featured many layers and a polyfoam backing against a net. Two life-size models were built: one was a featureless prop, used when the dead Basilisk lies dead on the floor of the chamber; it was painted by Elaine Cartwright Best and other painters. The other model was a fully animatronic hero Creature; its eyes are already gouged out, as the shots featuring the Basilisk with its peculiar yellow eyes were all planned prior to be computer generated sequences. The mechanized Basilisk’s skin was painted by Astrig Akseralian and other painters. The entire building process took place in an old Airplane factory in Leavesden Studios, Hertfordshire. The finished animatronic Basilisk featured a jaw-opening mechanism, moving eyelids, nostrils and tongue. As a peculiar piece of trivia, the controllers of the Basilisk were actually capped with pool balls.

The completed animatronic Basilisk.

In addition to the Basilisk models themselves, the special effects team also created the life-size shed skin — found in one of the scenes immediately prior the onscreen appearence of the Basilisk. The shed skin was made of urethane rubber with fibreglass inserts to achieve an organic appearence, and was painted by Elaine Best.

“When we did the Basilisk for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, we made the head and 20 bits of the body so it was enough for the close-up interaction,” Dudman said, “but there’s no way you can make a 70ft sliding snake.” A great majority of the shots featuring the Basilisk in the final film was, in fact, obtained with key frame computer generated imagery — created by the artists of Framestore in London. The textures of the 3D model were painted by Jason Horley. Apparently in-keeping with Pliny’s description (although no sources cite direct inspiration), the Basilisk frequently moved with its head erect above the ground.

For more images of the Basilisk, visit the Monster Gallery.

*Which explains why this article is not in the Guest Stars category, as you might have wondered.

Hungarian Horntail is the label given to a Dragon species in Joanne Rowling’s Harry Potter series of novels. Specifically, one single individual of this monstrous species appears in the fourth book, The Goblet of Fire, as the first trial of the Triwizard tournament. The Dragon guards a golden egg, which has to be obtained avoiding the beast’s fiery rage. In the novel, the task, while certainly difficult, was resolved relatively quickly — with the aid of Harry’s broom; in the film adaptation, the Dragon breaks free from its chain and chases the wizard in a long action sequence, which ends with the beast falling into a chasm. it is unclear if the Hungarian Horntail survived or not.

Both the novel and the script for the film adaptation are not detailed in their description of the Dragon. The most recognizable trait is the creature’s tail — which ends in a spined, club-like protrusion, used for offense — hence the name ‘Horntail’. Paul Catling, designer of most creatures from the Harry Potter series, had considerable creative liberty on the design of the Dragon. The special effects team, however, set out to make a spectacular, surprising creature. “The biggest challenge is to make them not look like what anyone else has done,” said Nick Dudman. “So when you’re doing dragons, werewolves, anything that’s iconic you hit a problem because a lot of the good ideas have already been done, so you have to find a different angle.”

Concept art by Paul Catling.

In the tradition of DragonSlayer, and in line with the first film of the series, the final Hungarian Horntail features a Wyvern-like configuration, with a total of four limbs. The front hindlegs also served as the creature’s formidable wings. The dorsal region of the creature, starting from the back of the head itself, presents a series of bony thorns, some of which can be moved in a threatening manner — much like a crest or a frill. The namesake thorned club at the end of the tail was kept.

Once again, Nick Dudman and his special effects team took on the duty to bring the Dragon to the screen. Two small scale maquettes were sculpted, created in fibreglass and painted for reference — both for the computer generated model and the imposing, full-size animatronic model. Kate Hill led the creation of the full-size sculpture, aided by Waldo Mason, Andy Hunt and other sculptors. The creature’s skin, created in Polyurethene, was also painted by Hill and Mason. The thorns on the Dragon’s head, neck and back were created in coloured resin, and were of 6 different sizes; a total of 200-300, including ‘backup’ thorns (in case the mounted ones broke) were made. The larger spikes were reinforced with fibreglass matting. Each thorn was individually hand finished, and painted once put in place on the Dragon.

The finished full-size Horntail animatronic. The thorns on the head and back of the creature were actually sharp and pointed — as you can see, the ones on the head are covered with rubber protections.

The finished Dragon animatronic was mounted on a mobile, wheeled unit — which eased transport of the enormous prop. The head could turn around and roar, the wings could make limited movements and the body was able to move from side to side. Peculiar to this model was an actual fire-breathing function, installed in the neck of the animatronic by John Richardson’s mechanical effects team. Due to that, obviously, the internal and external materials of the head were made fireproof.

In the final version of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the practical model was unfortunately left entirely unused, replaced by the computer generated model (created by Industrial Light & Magic) in all the scenes scheduled for its appearence. The practical Horntail would, however, have brief time of glory during the film’s world premiere in London.

The Horntail animatronic with the flame-throwing feature in action.

Special thanks to Shaune Harrison, who provided most of the information and pictures featured in the article and gallery.

For more pictures of the Hungarian Horntail, visit the Monster Gallery.

Time not important.
Only Life important.

Every five thousand years, the entire universe is threatened by the physical reincarnation of the Great Evil — a terribly ancient entity from another dimension, whose coming in our world is triggered by certain planet and star alignments. The key to defeat this monstruosity from beyond time is a weapon of perhaps divine design, which is triggered by the placement and activation of five Elements. A race of otherwordly creatures protects these Elements — they are the guardians of life: the Mondoshawans.

One of the finished Mondoshawan suits.

The Mondoshawans appear as quite large, 8′ tall and 5′ wide beings, with a shiny metallic outer covering displaying golden and copper-esque tones. They feature thick legs — giving them their peculiar walk — and large, ‘plated’ arms. Several parts of their bodies emit light, either artificial light or bioluminescence. It is in fact unclear whether the Mondoshawans, as they are visually seen, are artificial entities or biological beings, with otherwordly and perhaps incomprehensible metallic-looking skin. Each Mondoshawan displays a series of dorsal thorns. They are unique to each creature, and define their rank — other than aiding ventilation and communication.

The leader Mondoshawan — labeled as ‘Kommander’ in early script drafts — and John Bennett as the Priest.

Nick Dudman and his special effects team built all the creature effects for The Fifth Element — and the Mondoshawans were no exception. According to Dudman himself, they were the single most challenging task in the entire production. “The Mondoshawans were the single biggest problem we were gonna have, primarily because of their size, and what they had to do, and what they looked like. They were rigid, metallic creatures.” The Mondoshawans were brought to the screen as creature suits; their building process however, was unlike anything Dudman and his team had done before. The Mondoshawans were designed by illustrator Jacques Rey. According to Monique Brown, animatronic designer, good part of the complexity derived from the design of the creatures themselves, which featured a main ellyptical shape. The Mondoshawan full-size moulding sculpture was undertaken by Mark Godderidge and a team of sculptors, including Mark Coulier, who also designed and fabricated the arms and articulated hand mechanisms of the creatures.

Mondoshawan concept art by Jacques Rey.

The special effects team spent a considerable time in actual planning for a proper understructure of the Mondoshawan suits. A foam mock-up test suit, featuring the basic design shape, was first built. “We stand back,” Dudman commented, “and we think, ‘what are we looking at? It’s crap!’”. The final material of the suits was in fact changed to an external covering of fibreglass. Large areas of the suits were moulded in mesh — something that aided internal ventilation. Due to the Mondoshawans’ height, from 7’8″ to full 8 feet, a minimal height for the actual performers was required. Seven 6’9″ actors, including Justin Lee Burrows and Richard Ashton, were casted as the Mondoshawans.

The Mondoshawans on set.

The final suit understructure featured a harness, which in turn held a cage-like steel structure –  the purpose of which was to support the enormous upper half of the Mondoshawan. This expedient transferred the weight of the upper structure down to the performer’s hips, easing the movements of the actors. “When the performers agreed to do it,” said Monique Brown, “they had no idea what they were going into. And some of the performers were great about it, and others were like ‘I can’t do this’. And in fact we did have to change some of the performers — because they just couldn’t do it.”

The suits included a separate part for the head section — including the head itself, the neck and its base. Several ‘standard’ heads with basic movements were built, as well as a fully mechanized hero head. The heads were easily interchangeable, thanks to a simple sliding plate. the hero head was first constructed by John Coppinger, and later refined by Steve Wright. The animatronic mechanisms were built by Chris Barton; they included full neck motion and ‘lighting-up’ eyes. The vents, or vent-like structures on the snout could move to simulate talking and breathing. The sight of the performer inside was completely obscured; to solve this issue, small monitors were installed right behind the head and neck mechanisms. The actor could see what happened on set thanks to an external camera, installed above the head, in the centre of the suit. The camera simply transmitted footage to the monitor inside, enabling a more precise coordination.

Suiting up the actors on the day of shooting was a most impressive process. “Getting the guy inside, into the suit,” said Dudman, “required a sort of C-shaped platform, like a docking bay. There were about three steps, that my crew could stand on.” The actors would have to wear the leg parts of the suit first; a safety bar prevented the legs to move too far apart or too quickly. The actor would then have to enter the ‘docking bay’. It is here that the crew would put the understructure and other suit parts on them. 3 crewmembers were needed to suit up each performer, and the process would take up to 20 minutes for each unit.

The Guardians arrive.

Once on set, in Pinewood studios, the actual filming of the Mondoshawans was not any less arduous than what preceded it. Each Mondoshawan was puppeteered by 4 crewmembers. Due to the considerable heat inside the suits, only short sequences could be shot singlehandledly. The most complex scene to film was the arrival of the Mondoshawan in the ancient temple. Dudman recalled: “when we did the scene, they were all walking down the corridor — there were 6 people, all with Walkie-talkies, [saying] ‘left of it, left of it, slow down, slow down!’” The coordination of all the performers was enormously complex to finally achieve as it is seen in the final film.

For reasons currently unknown, all the Mondoshawan suits were to be destroyed after production. Nick Dudman managed to save one of his team’s creations. “The Mondoshawans were gonna be destroyed,” he said, “and in fact, more than that, the destruction process was gonna be video taped — so that there would be video proof that these things were destroyed. So, I was understandably rather upset by this, so I went to Patrice Ledoux and Iain Smith, the executive producers, and said, ‘look, please, you know, can’t we keep them?’ And he said ‘No!’; ‘can we keep one? You know, it’s your property, you can sell it, but can I just keep one? And Patrice said yes — so, I’ve got a Mondo. It was lovely, because they were such beautiful objects when they were finished, and it seemed a shame. Because we had such a nice time on the movie we actually got affectionate to these things. But, I’m glad we could preserve one.”

The surviving Mondoshawan suit has sought refuge at the Prop Store of London. Other single parts of the other suits, such as portions of arms and head sections, were salvaged as well and sold to private collectors.

The surviving full Mondoshawan suit at Project Pinewood, in 2008. “This Mondo is the first to approach Professor Pacoli (John Bluthal),” said Stephen Lane, owner of the Prop Store of London, “and shakes his head when questioned if he is German. This creature is also the one that ultimately stuns the professor as the Mondo’s proceed into the inner chamber. The Mondoshawan has now sought refuge at the Prop Store and we are still trying to work out what he eats – hopefully not props.”

Main Article: Guest Stars: The Mondoshawans

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.

Fawkes makes a cameo in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, for which an entirely new digital model was devised; it was reused in Half-Blood Prince, for the final sequence where Fawkes leaves Hogwarts following the death of his master.

For more pictures of Fawkes, visit the Monster Galleries:

• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

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. Each one of the spider’s hairs was manually inserted; the finer hairs were broom hairs, whereas the larger ones were feathers with a coat of synthetic hair and Lurex. 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 monitors at disposal, so that 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.

Dear Harry, Ron, and Hermione!
Aragog died last night. Harry and Ron, you met him and you know how special he was. Hermione, I know you’d have liked him. It would mean a lot to me if you’d nip down for the burial later this evening. I’m planning on doing it round dusk, that was his favourite time of day. I know you’re not supposed to be out that late, but you can use the cloak. Wouldn’t ask, but I can’t face it alone.

Hagrid

In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the audience witnesses the funeral of the giant spider. The dead Aragog was portrayed by a full-size model devised by Shaune Harrison and crew. Its sculpture was based on the Chamber of Secrets Aragog moulds, but manually resculpted to show its age and decay. The model was moulded in urethane to reproduce the translucent quality of a real dead spider, and its hairs were built with the same materials as the other puppet. Aragog was a beloved character of the creature effects team — so much that the crew actually wore black armbands during filming of the spider’s funeral scene.

Aragog’s legacy lived on, with his offspring making one final appearance in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows during the battle for Hogwarts — as digital creatures. ” Framestore did the giant spiders,” said visual effects supervisor Tim Burke. “That has a sweet backstory. Andy Kind, the supervisor who did the spiders, was the one at Mill Film who had worked with me on the spiders on the second film nine years back. Mill Film closed down, so those spiders no longer existed. He rebuilt them by referencing footage from that film.”

Farewell, Aragog, king of arachnids, whose long and faithful friendship those who knew you won’t forget! Though your body will decay, your spirit lingers on in the quiet, web-spun places of your forest home. May your many-eyed descendants ever flourish and your human friends find solace for the loss they have sustained.

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

Main Articles:

• Serpent of Slytherin
• The Dementors
• The Dragon at Gringotts
  

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. Essentially, Cuarón wanted “something that was abstract and metaphysical.”

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.”

The Dementors returned in an early sequence from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. They received an aesthetic makeover following the guidelines of director David Yates: the cloak was dialled back, thus exposing the creatures’ head and mouth and revealing more of their anatomy. Their tails were also lengthened to further highlight body language and movement.

Industrial Light & Magic developed new digital Dementors from scratch, having changed pipeline in the years following the production of Prisoner of Azkaban — going from B-spline modeling to subdivision modeling in Maya. The artists were able to reuse the original body design, but the cloth covering was completely revised. “Just like the Thestrals, the Dementors were built and animated in Maya,” explained Tim Alexander, visual effects supervisor. “The Dementors’ body was textured using displacement maps and paintwork, whereas the cape was created using many different displacement and opacity maps. We also added geometry to the edges of the cloth, so that rather than painting a frayed edge, we actually made a frayed edge. We hung little pieces of string off of the edge of the cloth, and ran a secondary simulation on those. It gave us an edge that was really tattered, while on Azkaban, we simply had opacity maps that we couldn’t use in a simulation.”

Animation of the Dementors had two layers: keyframe animation for the body and fabric simulation for the cloak. Compared to the Prisoner of Azkaban version, the cloth simulation was far more advanced, also because the animation had to satisfy Yates’ demands. Alexander related: “David wanted cloth tendrils to move like an octopus. When the Dementor reached out with his hand, he wanted the cloth to also reach out and grab hold of Harry.”

To that end, ILM devised a system of so-called spherical ‘attractors’ to control specific areas on the cloth. “Animators could guide the strips by telling attractors where they should go,” Alexander said. “When we ran the cloth simulation, it gave us an organic movement in which the strips would reach out to pre-designated points. It took a lot of fine-tuning to make it look natural, and not like the cloth was being pulled by the attractors.” Ironically enough, the new animation design was discarded in favour of a look closer to the original’s.

For Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II, creation of the Dementors was passed over to Rising Sun Pictures. The digital effects team developed a whole new creature rig with improved cloth simulation. Another innovation was the use of digital smoke to enhance their silhouette. “The Dementors were really just a black silhouette,” said Tony Clark, Rising Sun visual effects supervisor. “But you can get a lot of emotion from them even though they are just a head, two sticky arms and the flowing cloth that has a seaweedy underwater feeling. The original brief was for them to be inside the courtroom which was a very dark environment, so they were enveloped in smoke to read the silhouette.”

For more pictures of the Dementors, visit the Monster Galleries:

• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II

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

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.

Main Articles:

• The Dementors
• Thestrals