Apologies, but I have migrated the documentation of the VFX coverage to a blog better suited for it and away from my personal site... thx.

http://vfxtippingpoint.blogspot.com/

We will be completing work that will become the final glimpses of our wolves in the Twilight Saga later this fall... This is the final chapter to the Stephanie Meyer series and the end is nigh. Status? so far so good cranking away on the large battle sequence, some of which you briefly see in the trailer above. ~enjoy

Apologies for the great distance between updates, although I know not who I'm apologizing to... if no one else, it's for a future me going back to read all this crap before I'm dead. Or maybe it's just so my co-workers can laugh at me, either way I win.

Mirror Mirror has long since wrapped as a painful memory in my VFX career, I'm currently knee deep in Breaking Dawn part 2, the last film containing Tippett's Twilight wolves... this will be my 4th movie now... dear Stephanie Meyer, thank you writing these, and yet, thank you for not having written any more.  Any plans on writing more Twilight lore? Please don't.

I saw  Prometheus last night... and I loved it, such a stunning movie on most all levels equating a magnificent movie going experience.  Hi-Five Mr. Scott, Gieger, Michael Fassbender, and the VFX Houses involved.

One of these days I'll be going back in time and shoveling dirt loads of updates making up for lost time, it will all come at once, BAM!

Only 6 days to go... Phil Tippett's "Mad God" Kickstarter, Get It!

visit Breaking Dawn @ imdb.com

While it wasn't quite able to reach the series high mark, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1's outstanding $138.1 million opening indicated that the sexy teen vampires are as popular as ever. What does appear to have lost some of its appeal, however, is dancing penguins: Happy Feet Two struggled to even open to half as much as its popular 2006 predecessor. Overall box office was up around 14 percent to over $221 million, and the weekend currently ranks as the sixth-highest on record.

Breaking Dawn's $138.1 million opening is second-best among Twilight movies behind 2009's New Moon ($142.7 million). That's a small gap, though, and Breaking Dawn still managed to claim fifth place on the all-time opening weekend chart behind Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, The Dark Knight, Spider-Man 3 and New Moon. As is typical for the Twilight movies, its weekend was incredibly front-loaded with 51.9 percent of the gross coming from Friday showings (including its $30.25 midnight tally).

A stand-out sequence in Tarsem Singh's Immortals takes place near the climax of the film, when King Hyperion frees a group of entombed Titans from their cell using the powerful and magical Epirus Bow. But before the released Titans can escape, the Gods descend from Mount Olympus and work to dispatch them. A bloody close-quarters fight ensues, with Tippett Studio combining live action footage, motion captured performances and CG Titans and effects to create the final shots.

In particular, the battle is punctuated by something known as 'God Speed' to emphasize the otherworldly powers of the Gods and Titans. "When the Titans died," explains Tippett Studio visual effects supervisor Matt Jacobs, "they wanted them to take on a slow motion effect. So when you see them get chopped in two or a head chopped off or smashed by Zeus' chain they wanted it to feel more photosonic - around 500 frames per second - so there was a speed ramp as the Titan dies and then goes into slow motion."

We talk to key members of the Tippett team about how they realized the animation, effects, lighting and compositing for the Gods versus Titans fight.

Compositing

Although the fight combined live action, motion capture, CG Titans and effects, the compositing, according to compositing supervisor David Schnee, remained within reason. "We had your typical re-times, plate clean-up and times when we had to make some of the action a little snappier to emphasize certain moves and strikes," he says.

Tiles were shot all around the set to enable room to move the camera and re-compose certain scenes if needed. Tippett's Christopher Paizis was the matchmove lead. The scenes were all comp'd in 2D in Nuke, and elements later broken out to allow for the stereo conversion. An initial effort to give the Titans and Gods a vibrating look in order to sell their speed was undertaken, but the approach changed to the photosonic feel. Additional comp fixes included adding some more transparency and sub-surface feel to the blood where needed and matching some of the live action Titans with their CG counterparts, occasionally fine-tuning markings on helmets or skirt and sandal trims.

"Our biggest challenge though," says Schnee, "was dealing the projections that we needed to help pad all the wounds that would occur when the Titans were severed and heads lobbed off. They built some nice wound artwork on all the caps for that stuff but there wasn't enough time to go in and do a lot of interesting dressing of paintwork that would have blood splattered onto skin and dripping down the contours of their body and on clothing. So we came up with a pretty cool projection set-up gizmo in Nuke to handle that."

The projection technique began with a key pose of a Titan, fully dressed and mocked up, with a camera target and locator to project onto. "We could then easily place our splatter or drips onto him," says Schnee. "That would get un-UV'd and applied to the animated GTOs for the shot."

In one hero shot, a chain goes through the chest and impales a Titan. "For that there was a little bit of dressing on the Titan for the wound," notes Schnee. "But then he also ends up dropping and stepping towards the chain towards camera. The CG blood that is blasted off from the impact bursts out in front of him and then he steps into it. So the artist on the shot animated certain timings of the projection to time with the CG blood, which we had as a number of effects passes."

The final shot

Tippett's overall shot count on Immortals came to 96, made up also of a CG hyena-like 'mongrel' that replaced a live action German Shepherd for a couple of shots, and CG Titans added to the film's final complicated 'Sistine Chapel' pull-out, which was shared with RedFX in Montreal.

"That shot had been done originally for a teaser trailer," says Matt Jacobs. "It was filmed in photosonic stereo for everything in the foreground and then in the background the characters were on a multi-planes and multi-directions - all these Gods and Titans fighting at the same time. It was literally hundreds of takes on greenscreen that went into the shot. Tarsem wanted to gore it up so we added CG Titans, blood simulations and parts flying in slow motion, taking some cues from the death effects we had done already. We also inherited a massive Nuke script from RedFX and there was a lot of co-ordination with them to get all the assets. Then we integrated our work into it, and passed it back to them to do some finishing."

All images and clips copyright © 2011 Relativity Media.

An initial detailed previs effort was carried out by overall visual effects supervisor Raymond Gieringer and the effects design team, which specified the action of five individual fights between the Gods - Zeus, Poseidon, Athena, Heracles and Apollo - and the Titans. On set, stunt Titan actors in black and crackley textured make-up fought against the Gods actors in a battle orchestrated by fight choreographer Jean Frenette. Clean passes with just the Gods acting out their moves were also filmed. DoP Brendan Galvin captured plates on the Panavision Genesis in mono (the final shots were post converted to stereo) at either 24 or 48 fps.

Later, a motion capture shoot took place with the same stunt actors, in anticipation of all of the Titans being created as CG characters by Tippett. But the scope of the fight and the impressive stunt performances led to a change in the approach. "The choice was made to actually use production footage of the Titans and then, when they were killed, we would insert our CGI Titans," says Matt Jacobs, who oversaw Tippett's work along with visual effects producers Ken Kokka and Sabina Fredenburg.

During the mo-cap shoot, the stunt performers attempted to replicate the live-action portions of the fight filmed earlier. "We had studied the fight extensively from what had been laid out by the stunt co-ordinator Jean Frenette," notes Jacobs. "We knew all the parts of the fight but over the course of three or four days had to mo-cap every part of it we needed. We broke it down into individual elements and larger sections, and really dissected the choreography to get all the data we needed."

Animation

Click the image for a larger version.

The mo-cap data was then processed - Michael Brunet had served as on-set animation supervisor - and the cut turned over to Tippett. "Generally, our animation guys would start with the motion capture," says Jacobs, "then massage it into place and take over whenever a Titan was killed because we were chopping off heads and splitting guys in two down the middle of their bodies in a cross-section. I'd say it's 80% animation and 20% mo-cap, but the motion capture was a great basis for the shots - it would have taken a lot longer if it had been fully hand-animated."

Immortals was Tippett's first foray into motion capture work, and so required augmentation to the existing Maya pipeline to incorporate MotionBuilder. "Our puppet/rigging department led by Eric Jeffery did a great job of figuring out how our Titans rig could be plotted onto the mo-cap motion," says animation supervisor James Brown. "Then once we had it on our rigs we brought in Rick Thomas who did the MotionBuilder to Maya transfers. He had a lot of experience in tackling the data and just letting the animators focus on the animation, which was a nice blend of mo-cap and keyframe."

For Brown, the most challenging aspect of combining mo-cap and keyframe was "when we didn't have a motion capture pass for a particular shot - well, then you've got to hand-key that stuff." The solution, however, was to look to the original live action fight choreography as reference, as well as video of the mo-cap shoot which had also been taken. "Overall, the fun part of this show was that we just had to fight," adds Brown. "As a VFX junkie, animating deaths was actually a lot of fun. And if it looked cool, it was cool - that was our bar of measurement - make them look tough, brutal and as gruesome as we could."

To deal with the photosonic aspects of the fight - the story point being that the Titans and Gods move so fast that humans cannot see them until they die - animators actually manipulated different parts of the bodies at different times. "Our initial approach was to slow it down," recalls Brown, "but then it would look a little boring. So we would move an arm faster than the head, then make the torso drive the action, trying to make it feel like something was pulling the Titan from behind as he gets cut in half."

In fact, the slow motion look had to work not only in each shot but also across the cut to suit the dramatic blood effects. "We couldn't have anything pop or come to a complete stop because that would throw a whole monkey wrench into the CG department doing the blood," says Brown. "So we developed something called Master Shots. As an animator you'd work in a bunch of shots in one Maya scene and that allowed us to ensure the motion was consistent across the cut."

A muscle pass for the Titans was also added to deal with weight and jiggle, while small animation details became crucial in selling the fast-paced scene. "We had this simple expression for the face," comments Brown. "It's amazing how much you can see by just doing a small mouth movement - you could really sell the character as real. We also added some foot squish when their feet hit the ground and the toes slightly spread out which really helped sell the weight coming down on the foot."

The more gory parts of the fight - when the Titans are decapitated, lose their limbs or are even sliced in half - required separate rigs for different body parts. "We had to develop these two rigs on top of each other," says Brown, "and then rig-swap over one frame, where there's a pre-frame before the Titan gets sliced. You'd do the entire animation through and then find your slice point, and then at that point you switch rigs and start animating body parts flying off. You have to try to get them to sync up - they had to match up for a good 10 to 20 frames ahead of the slice in order for it not to cause problems in effects. Then there was a lot of back and forth with effects to get the blood spray to work with the pieces."

Effects

Another signature aspect of the Gods and Titans confrontation is the stylized blood emanating from the victims. For that, Tippett embraced Houdini for the fluid dynamics work. "When we came onto the film," says Matt Jacobs, "the scene was described as a 'ballet of blood'. We knew that the blood had to be almost like a character in the shot. We used Houdini and also our own in-house surfacer for the blood and did all of the meshing with proprietary software."

Lead FX artist Scott Singer experimented first with the right look and feel of the blood spurts. "Houdini had announced their FLIP fluids just before we had to do some test images," he says. "I'd been working in Maya using their particle fluids and was applying a lot of interesting engineering and we were getting some pretty good results, but I decided to try Houdini. In my own time I would play with it and I found that by using the FLIP solver and emitting particles it was looking as good as what we had already come up with."

The blood itself fell into three categories. Firstly, there was a sheet of blood seen as broad ribbons, then a 'schwap' element, described by Singer as "the undefined splattery bits that would come of the huge horrific wounds, which were done in both Houdini and Maya." Finally, a misty fog layer of almost atomized blood was added using Maya, although this became dialled back later on when the director preferred the strong graphic quality of the sheeting blood.

The scene data for the blood effects was cached in the GTO file format (although Tippett plans to move to Alembic when it can). "The environments and the characters and the weapons and all of that came to us from Maya," explains Singer, "and exported into these GTO files. From that point we could take them back into Maya or Houdini to do the fluid effects. Then we exported it all back out and it rendered the same way."

The blood matches, of course, the photosonic shots, but to create the slow motion look, artists had to 'lie' to the solvers in Houdini. "Basically we had to tell it that time was going at a really bizarre rate," says Singer. "We had to either speed up or slow time down. We also had to lie about how big things were in the screen. We would tell it, 'Hey, here's a six foot tall Titan,' but he was really only a foot and a half tall. So the blood coming out of it is now only an inch and a half wide instead of a two foot wide ribbon. When you start to lie about physics it will hold together well for a few frames but then starts to fall off pretty quickly as the shots get longer."

"We also wrote some special drag forces that we could apply," continues Singer. "When the characters would get hit with a weapon, they would go into this two or three frame over-acceleration before they would go into slow motion. That contrast would accentuate the punch of the moment. We had to make all the dynamics match that. They would be differential based on the velocity, so we could get huge explosions. We'd over-damp them and then ease off on the damping. That was really helpful for getting that initial sense of exploding at a million miles an hour and suddenly being arrested over the course of a few frames - great for the schwap elements."

In addition, effects work was required for the Titans' skirts. "The anim team did a little bit of animation on the skirts making sure they moved very suddenly across the transition," says Singer. "We could sim them up to the transition and clamp all the sim off across the transition and ease it back in as they went into slow-motion. Animation were very good in making sure the legs didn't stick through the skirts and that sort of thing. There's also a flap at the front of the Titan's skirt - we had a fair amount of difficulty sim'ing that, just because in the ultra slow-mo the simulation engine wasn't getting enough input for it to stay alive. It would just lock off, so the animators applied a hand-animated twist to that element."

The shot in the effects department that turned most heads was called the 'fly paper' shot. Here, a Titan is thrown against a wall, but then comes off of it very suddenly before slowing down into photosonic mode. "The effects were done by Jonathan Ramos for that shot," notes Singer. "We were asking for artwork from production because it was a particularly graphic moment and they did a great paint-over where they wanted the blood to happen and where they wanted it to stream and fall apart. And then using dynamics and special shape emitters, Jonathan was able to hit the artwork almost perfectly."

Lighting

In another first for Tippett, the studio implemented ray-traced area lights for the fight sequence to achieve a more physically accurate lighting response off the characters. In the past they had relied on simpler CG spotlights. That new set-up was spearheaded by CG supervisor Aharon Bourland. "In the scene the Titans were basically just humans with a very elaborate displacement texture on them," says Bourland. "The lighting had to be very real and the shadows very accurate in the plate so that they felt really real, because you could get into the Uncanny Valley very quickly with them."

Past shows for Tippett had generally involved significant fur work, something that historically had been expensive to use area lights for. "But when Immortals came along," recalls Bourland, "and it was all hard parts - in terms of the raw geo - so we thought this was a good chance to test a different method. We knew it would take a lot longer to render compared to spotlights, but actually compared to a fully furred character the render times weren't that bad." (The system has since been successfully used for Tippett's wolves on The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 1).

With software engineer Mike Farnsworth, Bourland re-wrote Tippett's RenderMan shaders to enable the new area light set-ups. "We built it from the ground up allowing multiple sampling which made it really easy to go to area lights from spotlights. The one big advantage of having more physically based lighting was that we could have just one or two lighting set-ups for the entirety of the shots. We could re-create the lighting they used on set. Since it was all shot on one location, we didn't have to do nearly as much shot-specific lighting which was a benefit that I don't think we had thought of when we started."

"Our approach also worked well because as the lights got bigger the spec would broaden out," adds Bourland, "and the shadowing would get better and the diffuse would wrap nicely. You wouldn't get hard, weird shadows. It gave you much more form off the characters."

The lighting team (Howard Campbell was the lead lighting technical director) implemented what Bourland refers to as 'creative sloppiness' into the scenes. "I really like naturalistic lighting - not making it so art directed. I feel like a lot of CG gets over-lit and over-directed. Artists sometimes try and get every rim and every light perfect on the character, but I actually like it when it's a little sloppier. When you're shooting things for real you light the best you can but it's not like you hit every single light perfectly as the actors are walking around. Creative sloppiness involved just putting the light somewhere and letting the character walk through it - not tracking the light to them."

The CG work extended also to techniques for revealing the slashed internal parts of the Titans in an efficient way - not having to model every single organ. Says Bourland: "When the guys are ripped apart we had to come up with a fast method to show them being dismembered in crazy ways. We would do an initial pass on modelling, and then we would sculpt the end cast as flat planes, but then we took them into Mudbox and would do elaborate sculpts on them and use vector displacement to do all the internal organs. We could turn on and off the surface parameters and have the blood and guts and lungs falling out. It sounds a bit gruesome but it's so incredibly choreographed that it's pretty."

Immortals ~ 11-11-11

"Fight for honor! Fight for you future!" If you haven't already seen enough to whet your appetite for Tarsem Singh's fantasy epic Immortals, Relativity recently released an extended 60-second TV spot for the movie over on Fandango. There's a lot of the footage we've seen the second and third trailers for Immortals, and some new stuff, but most just lots of awesome action, badass music, lots to get you hyped up to see this. Henry Cavill stars as Theseus, Mickey Rourke as the evil King Hyperion, as well as Luke Evans, John Hurt, Kellan Lutz, Stephen Dorff and Freida Pinto. I can't wait to watch this, only a few months left. Enjoy! (firstshowing.net)

"I definitely have a happily ever after thing going on!" No she doesn't. Relativity let loose the first official trailer for Tarsem's Mirror Mirror, his "sickeningly kiddie" take on Snow White, and you need to see it just to see how bad it is. In this one, Lily Collins stars as Snow White, Julia Roberts as the Evil Queen, and Armie Hammer as the Prince, but it looks as far in the opposite direction of Huntsman as anything could be. It seems like an animated movie come to life, complete with Nathan Lane and silly dwarfs. Even Julia Roberts looks like she's phoning it in, enough to make me want to stay far, far away from this. Enjoy!

Watch the first full trailer for Tarsem Singh's Mirror Mirror, via Yahoo, below:

You can also download the official Mirror Mirror trailer in High Def on Yahoo

An exiled princess enlists the help of seven resourceful rebels to win back her birthright, and an evil Queen steals control of a kingdom, in a magical adventure comedy filled with jealousy, romance, and betrayal.

Mirror Mirror is directed by visionary Indian filmmaker Tarsem Singh, of The Cell, The Fall and Immortals previously, which just opened. The screenplay was written by Melissa Wallack & Jason Keller (Machine Gun Preacher) based on the original story by the Brothers Grimm. Relativity Media is bringing Mirror Mirror to theaters starting on March 16, 2012 next year, well before Snow White and the Huntsman arrives in June.

We are into our final week on Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1, and wrapping it up pretty smoothly, I was anticipating a much more crazy final few weeks on this one, it's good to be ending on a less stressful note...  Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 begins sometime early next year for us.

A first in the saga, that Summit has decided to plaster in our ponies into a Twilight poster, which usually are medium close shots of characters, so same deal, just left some room for our wolves to creep.  Click on that sexy image of shark boy to view our wolves big like.

There were actually 2 new posters released, the one to the left, and the other is of newlyweds Edward and Bella, but nothing cool to see there.

...

4) The Wolf Pack, The Twilight Saga: New Moon

The wolves each had to have human eyes but wolf features, and six separate distinct personalities -- not to mention fur that moved realistically. The animators at Tippett Studio went to a wolf sanctuary and spent time with the endangered wolves, getting to know them. They even created their own "Frankenwolf" out of pelts from already-dead wolves. The result was a set of digital creatures which arguably had more personality than any of the humans on the screen.

io9.com ran a piece yesterday that covers the top 10 Computer-Animated or Motion-Captured Characters Who Actually Look Cool.  And what do you know?  Our Twilight wolves ranked in at #4 on that list, we'll take it.  The rest of that list is below:

10) The Owl, Labyrinth

9) Bit, Tron

8) The Dinosaurs, Jurassic Park

7) Dobby from the Harry Potter movies

6) General Grievous, Star Wars

5) Dragons, Game of Thrones

4) The Wolf Pack, The Twilight Saga: New Moon

3) Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and 3:

2) Gollum, Lord of the Rings

1) Queen Moat, Avatar

Tippett Studio visual effects supervisor Matt Jacobs takes us through his studio's work on the treasure vault sequence in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.

Article via fxguide.com by Ian Failes

fxg: This is a scene that called for a mass of replicating treasure. Can you describe the sequence?

Jacobs: Harry, Ron and Hermione have returned to the Gringotts bank to find another horcrux to destroy, which is in Helga Hufflepuff's Cup, in Bellatrix Lestrange's vault. They enter the vault with Griphook the goblin and another goblin. The first thing we had to do was the lumos effect from the wand tips. That was a mixture of 3D tracking and 2D compositing to create a very specific glow.

Download a clip from the treasure vault sequence

Then as they're wandering through this dark environment with treasure everywhere, Hermione knocks over a golden bracelet which falls on the floor. There's a still moment as it starts trembling, and then it basically pops like popcorn. That was the way it was described to us. It replicates into several different other bracelets. Then Ron is startled by it and he knocks into a silver platter which falls on the floor, and a golden chalice falls. All those things begin to replicate as well. At this point the treasure just starts taking off. So in a very short sequence we had to fill the entire room up with treasure. The volume just goes wild.

Hermione has the Sword of Gryffindor and she throws it to Harry while she is being surrounding by treasure. Harry starts climbing across this ever-expanding pile of treasure and pretty soon it's a mountain. There's a shot where we're pushing in through Ron and Hermione who are up to their waists, and the pile is growing and Harry's climbing up the treasure trying to get to the chalice. So it's actually working for him and against him as he's struggling through it.

At one point the treasure completely covers Harry and you think, 'Has he been buried alive?'. But then he comes bursting through this massive amount of treasure, falling back towards Ron and Hermione and the goblins. Then Griphook steals the sword away from Harry and the kids are left behind to be buried alive again. Eventually the treasure pours out through the door of the vault. So in this scene everything on the floor and the mounds that start growing were basically CGI treasure that we put into the shot.

fxg: How did they shoot this scene - was there some practical treasure?

Jacobs: In the beginning of the sequence, there was some treasure lying around the base of Hermione and Harry. It helped create some of the atmospheric lighting effects because it caused the light to be reflecting back up on them. Then as we go further into the sequence, they had some pneumatic lifts with gold mylar over them to create light bounce. Harry was climbing up this pile, five to six feet off the ground on these lifts. In that wide shot of Harry struggling through the pile, in all those shots he was climbing up these lifts and then all the treasure was treasure we put in the shots.

We had a LIDAR scan of the set and models that were representative of Ron, Hermione and Harry. We had to do match moves of all the kids in the room, and then it was left to the compositors to work out the integration between the kids and the treasure in Nuke. It was really a brute-force roto job, lots of z-depth mattes - especially when Harry comes bursting through the treasure at one point. I know the compositors spent a lot of time making sure the right treasure was in front of Harry and the right treasure was behind. I think down the road we would try and integrate deep compositing into the process, but we really only had six to seven weeks to complete the shots.

fxg: What approach did you take to the animation, especially considering there were so many pieces of treasure?

Jacobs: We had a two-pronged approach to this. We quickly realized that we weren't going to be able to do everything procedurally, say by using particle simulations or rigid body dynamics for everything. So what we decided to do was block out the entire sequence using very rough spheres for the level and the height of the treasure. So we would work out that the treasure needs to start at a certain volume at the beginning of the shot, and end at another.

We knew also there'd be an aspect to the treasure replication where it would be flying in the air and replicating in the air. So the first place we went was, 'What's the volume and how much do we need out of each shot?' Those were things that we could show to production and get feedback on the size of the mounds and have say more treasure flying over camera.

Once we had those mounds defined, we went into Houdini and we were able to do the replications we needed to do - create these piles replicating and growing. The basis for the overall activity and the volume was done in Houdini. Once the simulation was 90 per cent of the way along, we actually turned it back to our animators and they had a tool where they could take the simulation, instance the geometry and see it in Maya. In Maya, they were going in and hand-placing where the treasure was replicating. By the end of the process, the animators were making their own piles of treasure around Harry. It was a lot easier to do it in animation than through simulation, because you could direct the performance and composition of the piles.

fxg: What were some of the compositing challenges?

Jacobs: Getting the right depth of field was a real challenge. It was shot in a dark environment. There was a shallow depth of field. There was a fair amount of back and forth between the compositors, working with the technical directors to break up the scene so that the compositors had control over various layers to play with the focus. One issue you've got when you're pulling z-depth mattes to pull focus is if you've got a highly blurred object in the foreground, it can can affect everything in the background, unless you're using a deep compositing set-up.

fxg: For the treasure itself, how did you approach the look dev and rendering?

Jacobs: Everything was raytraced - a mixture of multiple bounce raytracing and single bounce, depending on the level of detail that we needed and how close the objects were to the camera. The reflective nature of the treasure was based mostly on environment maps of the set and then a few key lights to add a few hot kicks where we wanted them to highlight the metallic nature of the treasure.

The one thing I found that really tied the treasure to the look of the shot plates was leaning heavily on the lumos effect, and creating light pollution onto the treasure from the wands. We tried to create pools of light that mimicked the blue light from lumos onto the treasure. We did this by adding a balanced mixture of diffuse blue light and some really hot kicks with a blue glow around it.

All images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.