Tippett’s treasure trove of effects

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.

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.

Then as they’re wandering through this dark environment with treasure every

where, 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 trea

sure. 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 representativ

e 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.