Fantastic Beasts 2 special effects secrets: Niffler moment that you missed at Hogwarts

One of the major achievements of the Fantastic Beasts franchise is the imagination of the creatures – oh and the vast magical landscapes.

Fantastic Beasts won two Oscar nominations for his production design and costume, earning an Oscar for the latter. Grindelwald's most recent crimes have also been nominated for a BAFTA for their visual effects.

But who is behind the magic we see on the screen? Christian Manz is one of the spirits behind the creatures and visual effects that give life to JK Rowling's magical world.

Grindelwald's crimes are not the first time Manz has worked with director David Yates – he has credits since Harry Potter's films.

At the beginning of the pre-production, Yates asked Christian and his team to push the creativity towards the movie and have fun with the creatures.

Christian recently spoke about his work on the film at the VFX Festival, and then Mirror Online met him to talk about everything that was fantastic, about VFX and what the future reserved for the industry .

No time to read? Click on the video above to listen to our interview with Christian Manz – with additional secrets about Harry Potter and Dobby!

Fantastic Creatures – Zouwu

The movie is quite the operation. Some 1,500 artists work on the film in many installations around the world, with around a hundred people working on the same character.

Harry Potter has always had his creatures, from hippogriff to Dobby, but Fantastic Beasts goes even further.

"The Zouwu was particularly difficult," says Christian. "It must have been one, what Jo had written, and two, what everyone wanted – the Chinese creature – and finally we designed a particularly crazy design.

"David, the director, was not sure at first, but one of our animators loved it, he quickly built, modeled and animated, and that's what we Zouwu was worth because David loved it. "

The Zouwu is a pretty detailed design. It's a monstrously big feline beast, big as an elephant, with a striped body, a tousled mane, four fangs sticking out of its jaws, long sharp claws, and a bulky, disproportionate multicolored tail.

"By the nature of his face, it was pretty hard, with big eyes of insects, it's pretty hard to emit and you had to actually have a lot of subtle controls in there," says Christian. .

This paid off and ended up giving us one of the funniest moments of the movie.

"The little where Newt stirs the Zouwu toy in the air, everyone laughs at it and because they see something, everyone has a dog or a cat that would do the same thing.

"What our animators do is to study real animals, they study the natural world closely to see all these behavioral things.What is important with the animals are animals, not characters, but each animal. dog or cat has a character. "

Of course, the creatures offer us some of the best humorous moments of the Fantastic Beasts franchise.

The moment Niffler missed us all

"With the Niffler, especially with the first and second movies, you are trying to think of fun things," Christian said. "These are the things that lift him up."

To create fun moments, you must find what can be told, but also the little moments that you do not always see at the beginning.

"With the Niffler, there are times when he rubs his belly or wins gold," says Christian. "It's something you've seen, but it's a subtle animation – again, you see his little heart sinking under the feathers, you see the breaks, that's it." is one of the most difficult things to do.I think it's all that it does not do as it does. "

Christian adds that there is a particular moment in Grindelwald's crimes that the public does not always see.

"There is a bullet in there where almost no one ever sees," he says. "[The Niffler] steals something in the background, with Eddie in the foreground as Newt, and he steals something. "

The movement and inspiration for the Niffler actually came from another animal.

"I think it was originally from a domestic badger ransacking someone's garbage," Christian reveals. "The insatiable desire to enter the fridge and get food, nothing could stop him, and that's what makes him funny."

Places so convincing that they cheated the French

If creatures largely explain why we love Fantastic Beasts, the world in which wizards and witches live is another.

Christian works closely with Stuart Gray, who has worked on the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beast films to create the world we see on the screen.

"A lot of Paris still exists like in the 1920s and in New York, so Stuart begins with conceptual images of all the streets that appear in the film.It will use real locations, but using other buildings or buildings in motion. " around creating beautiful compositions ".

The team then had a "shopping list" to take to Paris, where they spent a month walking through entire streets, entire buildings, taking thousands of photos before returning. They then have digital models of all these buildings to match the concepts of the shots they shoot.

Data must be shared with facilities in the United Kingdom and Canada.

"We always shoot a lot of scenery, not all green screens," says Christian.

They work outside of that, creating shadows and effects so that it looks "as real as possible". Sometimes too real.

"I recently spoke to Paris and they asked us in what parts of Paris we shot and we did not go at all!"

… and again use Harry Potter's Hogwarts

Of course, one of the most iconic buildings – Hogwarts – was also made possible thanks to Christian and his team.

For the seven Harry Potter films, they had it built digitally.

"The team used the same material to rebuild and zhuzh for 2018," says Christian.

The inside of Hogwarts was the same place for Harry Potter one and two.

For the Great Hall, they swept the room of Warner Bros Studio Studio London.

"We digitally created the entire film, but using the actual game of the tour and referencing all the photographs and the movies themselves," says Christian.

The Ministry of Magic was the same, the team using drawings and photos from 10-15 years ago.

"We called sculptors to ask them for work," he says. "This franchise is unique, everything is in the museum, so it's as authentic as possible."

Harry Potter v Fantastic Beasts – What has changed?

Although the first films still provide a wealth of material, things have changed since the release of the first film.

"The big change is in the amount of visual effects content," says Christian. "When you go to the Harry Potter tour, things like the hippogriff, it was digital but there was a physical construction of the creature, when you go to the tour you see, they built a lot of things that you do not do more inevitably, the imagination is very important now, we can do more.

"If you were doing Fantastic Beasts at the time of Harry Potter, with New York, with Paris, we would not have seen as much of this city as we could show it today. "

This is mainly due to technology, of course.

"Computers have become faster and artists, we have more and more experience every year.

"The visual effects are catching up with an industry that's been around for over a hundred years, and the biggest difference for newcomers is that they have access to all this, much more easily than me, as they started not being able to use a computer. ".

There are many young talents who are making their way now. The festival found that 71% of future employees aged 16 to 25 reported wanting to work in the creative industries, despite the lack of career advice.

But art and design are losing popularity, with parents and students considering it as the least important subject to study at school, despite an increased interest in creative careers.

There is still hope for the future of visual effects and there is still a lot of work to be done – after all, JK Rowling said that there were three other Fantastic Beast movies .. .

But while people speculate on how movies will develop and use visual effects, Christian thinks that it can go one way.

"There will be more [special effects]but where are you going, you will not notice that much. Now, it's a craft, its use now is to create a world and allow the director and the writer to come up with things you would not do before – whether it's a spaceship or a creature .

"The making of films is becoming greener, less and less prepared, and everyone says there will be no more actors.I think there will be actors, there will always be performance. "

"The essential with digital characters is to get genuine performance, it continues to progress and we are integrating it."

For Christian, it is "increase and not create as much as possible".

What will really want to know? Will we have more Fantastic Beasts creatures?

"He's trying to push the boundaries of what's fantastic," says Christian. "It's trying to find the next Niffler.It's the biggest battle.The fight for me is really an idea, not technology.I just think of an idea.I think that a movie captures the public's imagination – with this type of movie is when they see something that they have not seen before – it's the hardest thing to do. "

The 2019 VFX Festival: Emerging Talents took place in February 2019 and was hosted by Escape Studios, a leading provider of VFX, Games, Animation and Motion Graphics courses. Join the industry professionals to The 2019 VFX Festival: After Hours or students and schools to The 2019 VFX Festival: EDU events of June 2019; to know more about thevfxfestival.com