Harry Potter and the software mystery

BANGALORE, INDIA: We all know very well about J K Rowlings's Harry Potter. Everyone would have seen this movie at least once, many of us would even have lost the count. But we hardly know what went behind in making these characters and the stupendous Howgwards real.

It is said that the special effects in the movies is contributed by the motion picture visual effects company called Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). It is the same company that produced special effects for over two hundred films, including the Indiana Jones series, the Jurassic Park franchise, the Back to the Future trilogy, many of the Star Trek films, Ghostbusters II, and the 2007 live-action Transformers movie.

Interestingly, for every movie, ILM is said to develop a customized software which helps in the special effects. The same was with this sixth series of Harry Potter. These are their proprietary software, that help in converting the fixed art into a realistic motion picture.

No one knows what the proprietary software used in Harry Potter actually helped in, but it would have been to make the production process more efficient and real-life.

Millennium bridge of London was an example of high-dynamic-range-image (HDRI) photography put into 3D and shown as real with the help of the softwares. The engineers worked on CAD files to recreate the look of the bridge, and then Maya was used for texturing and rigging the bridge making it as accurate as the real one.

CIOL spoke to some industry stalwarts to understand the function of these software and also the whole process that went behind making of this movie.

Said Aashish Goodae, manager production, (3D and gaming), DQ Entertainment, “Since these softwares are proprietary, there is a limited idea of the product-feature in the market. However, by seeing the movie one can observe that the software was significant in seamlessly merging the affects with real characters.”

Another use of the software is to automate the manual process. Taking an example of a lighting scene, Pankaj Khandpur, creative director, Tata Elxsi-Visual Computing Labs explained that tools can help us automate the process of applying same lighting effect in all the required frames, removing the manual process of creating same effect again and again for every frame.

“This helps is saving time and retaining the same quality and consistency of light in each frame,” he said. “Every time the technology is used to move to a new level and increase efficiency. This may not always reflect in the visual experience, but it is definitely significant in the production process.”

Elaborating more on the technology and techniques, Goodae said, “Software like Maya, Houdini and Xsi form the basic of any animation. They are developed through C++ and other basic languages. In this Maya is mostly used software today, while Houdini is the best recommend to visual effects.”

The basics start with shoot of the character, the actor is shot on a blue/green screen and then the screen is replaced with a background plate/ digital plate keeping the image of the actor. The background could be anything from a playing field to a room, and then many other character are added to the frame depending on the requirement.

The role of specialized/customized software comes here. They are used to merge the various layers or components in the picture as one picture. Like preparing a composite image on a photoshop with many layers. So this could explain how a fictitious character like voldermart, Inferi and real Daniel Radcliffe came into one frame with a castle or bridge in the background.

Many graphics come into play to add more life and reality to the composition. On an average a frame has around 20-30 layers, but in case of highly specialized ones like Harry Potter, it would have gone beyond 300 layers.

We all know that every picture goes in as a frame and when these frames move in a certain speed, they form a movie. But with multiple layers in one picture, the frames become quiet a big data/ file, and rendering these big files into a movie becomes a time-consuming affair.

Producers use the machines called Render Farms to compress the frames. These frames are workstations, with high-end graphic cards to multiply the processing speed 50 times faster. Then the frames become videos, that we all watch in the theaters.

This is not enough; every layer added to the frame undergoes a lot of work. This film had a new face – Inferi – a zombie-like creature. This is actually a molded silicon sculpture, which was taken on CAD and added with 3D effects to make it the real character, who lies under water.

Imagine a whole team of designers working only on the Inferi to make it fit for one picture.

According to Khandpur, “Many software help in bringing smoother movements in the animated characters, like drinking water, smoking. They are coded in a way to mimic these organic phenomenon of human more accurately.” The same is expected to have been used for the movements of that Zombie.

A new technology called stereoscopic 3d vision is catching up really fast in the market. Here two cameras, equidistant from human eyes, capture the motion and show on the screens with two projectors in the theater. The glasses worn by the viewers helps in polarizing the two images as one and making it look more real.

Who knows the next and last Harry potter series would be a stereoscopic one!