In the new Harry Potter movie, there’s a great sequence that explains the origin of the “Deathly Hallows”, three enchanted objects given to three brothers in a deal with death. The sequence is a great piece of animation, expertly woven into the tale and the live-action movie, presenting some fantastic detail and style to the wizarding fairy tale.
fxg: The detail in the characters is quite amazing, but what I liked is that you don’t actually see it at first because I think initially you notice them only as silhouettes.
Newton: Yes, it was actually a key thought to make things appear very clearly just by using tonality from light and shade, but we were still conscious of the fact that we didn’t want it to look simple. One of the things we worked out very early on was whether it should be a true three-dimensional production or whether it was to have a fake two-dimensionality to it. A few years back we did a sequence for The Tale of Despereaux, where we created this very interesting flat storybook sequence. We built flat rigs but played with perspective. So we were toying with doing a similar thing here.
via fxguide – vfx knowledge – Framestore: Deathly Hallows Animation.
