![harry potter and the deathly hallows: part 1 harry potter and the deathly hallows: part 1](https://images.moviesanywhere.com/39aa156b28f6215140b629628c19dfdc/98c49804-eff7-4b29-a4e8-5aad738f91c8.png)
Not long after, he's presenting the orphaned messiah Harry Potter and his two wizardly chums, the upper-middle-class Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) and the lower-middle-class Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), with mysterious inheritances from Dumbledore, their mentor and former headmaster at Hogwarts School for Wizardry. Penumbrously lit by Portuguese-born French cinematographer Eduardo Serra, the latest and penultimate film in the Harry Potter cycle (in fact the first half of JK Rowling's final book) begins with an ominous, Sergio Leone-style close-up of Bill Nighy telling us: "These are dark times." He sounds like any member of the coalition cabinet at the dispatch box, but he is, in fact, Rufus Scrimgeour, minister of magic. But more recently in popular culture, and especially in the movies, it's come to mean deep, serious, mature, dangerous and altogether more truthful, more worthy of intelligent consideration than anything categorised as "light" and thus frivolous and deceptive.
#Harry potter and the deathly hallows: part 1 skin#
We then restored areas of Harry's jacket, his shirt and hands by re-projecting and animating textures'. At the moment of his passing Framestore made Dobby's eyes appear watery, and desaturated his skin textures to make him wan and pale.The adjective "dark" has always suggested something sinister, often associated with the Prince of Darkness. That required a lot of paintwork, so we went to Leavesden and shot texture reference of Harry's wardrobe and Radcliffe's hands, and we used those textures to rebuild parts of Harry that the double had obscured. 'Tim Burke shot a lot of reference and clean plates, but the takes that David Yates chose were the ones of Harry interacting with the stunt double. 'The dummy and the body double became lighting reference for Framestore while integrating the animated character into Radcliffe's arms', he says. Compositing Supervisor Christian Kaestner led the 8-strong compositing team. Shot at Freshwater West in Wales, the gritty location shoot featured a Dobby-sized body double and a dummy. To highlight the drama of Bellatrix’s hurtling knife flying towards and into the group as they are transporting away, Yates asked that the shots look as if they'd been filmed on a Phantom camera, i.e. The rescue sequence at Malfoy Manor was notable from Framestore's point of view for its particularly demanding disapparation. Our animators were able to carefully craft emotive and believable human performances from careful observation of a variety of sources'. Burke persuaded Yates on the importance of having the voice actors on set and performing on film, and with these performances as reference, together with the animators' research (including photographic studies of Framestore's oldest employee), and, vitally, their own imaginations, the Framestore team was able to engineer a staging that worked convincingly within the context of the edit and the quirky physicality of the House Elves. 'But with mo-cap you get "everything", which can result in that slightly queasy, uncanny valley sort of look. 'Mo-cap is often Directors' and Supervisors' first choice when looking for photo-real humanoid performances', Animator Pablo points out. This followed a proof-of-concept demo prepared for Yates and Burke by a small team led by VFX Supervisor Christian Manz, Lead Animator Pablo Grillo and CG Supervisor Andy Kind in February 2009. An important pre-production decision – one that played to Framestore's strengths – was that the two elves would be keyframe animated rather than 'acted' through motion capture.