Dinosaurs vs Unicorns: VFX Breakdown: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

After watching the Star Wars VFX Breakdown it really interested me to start looking into more films that included really heavy CGI in them to see if they had breakdown videos as well, when I came across movingpicture.com which is an excellent company who show how they breakdown there VFX animations, which is exactly what I was looking for.

Its so exciting to see actually how much CGI went into making both of the last two Harry Potter films, as nearly all of it is computer generated. Like when I was watching the Star Wars one, I now know how much effort will have gone into making just one of these scene and it amazes me so much as it is an area of the industry that I am very interested in looking at in further detail.

For me these two breakdowns are fantastic and show just how much of this film was actually created by using VFX and it makes me really excited to know that I am going to be doing something a little bit like this as well. What really captivated me during the Harry Potter breakdowns in particular is the amount of layers that went into making some of the scenes. Take for instance the scene where the Death Eaters are flying over the city, this scene had an enormous amount of layering but it really worked to see. First they started off with an empty sky shot of just some ordinary looking clouds, they then reduced the colour on them to create the illusion of night and added a few more clouds around the edge of the scene, before putting in the ground, even though you don't really see it, adding all of the Death Eaters in, and then adding more colour overlays onto it to keep the illusion of night. Not to mention all of the different colours that are flying out of the wands at the same time, and the winged horses that needed animating.