DRAMA | H I S DARK MATER I ALS
We had chrome balls and grey balls that helped us understand the direction of the light
Hooper [the director] described this world to me as if religion, or the Magisterium, had control of the strings and, in the 1920s, stopped science in its tracks and let everything else continue. It’s sort of prehistoric in that respect.” PUPPET PASS One other obvious way in which this world is unlike our own is that humans’ souls have their own physical form; they take the form of animals, known as daemons, which don’t settle in shape until their human has reached a certain age. Brown found this similarly difficult to conceptualise. He explains: “In the book, it is the interaction between Lyra and Pantalaimon [her daemon] that draws you in, so you have to be able to show this in the TV adaptation. She has to be able to hold him and he has to be able to change form whenever he wants. They can’t just be in different frames the whole time.” This is something Hooper and VFX supervisor Russell Dodgson thought about deeply, and it was decided that first-pass takes would be done with puppets to help ensure emotional and realistic interactions between human actors and daemons. It also helped Brown frame his shots, because “it’s sometimes hard as a cinematographer to imagine where a daemon or imaginary character is going to sit within a frame if you don’t at least do a rehearsal shoot for reference”, he says. They then filmed clean plates featuring actors and an eyeline, such as a small
stick fixed with a ping-pong ball on top, in place of the puppets. Dodgson explains: “We wanted clean plates, because we didn’t want to be in a situation where 2000 shots needed a puppeteer painted out and a daemon painted in. It’s a lot of work. Imagine a shot of a daemon sitting in front of a fire, like Asriel’s daemon does in the Retiring Room in the first episode. If that was a puppet, we would need to paint that puppet out, rebuild the fire, paint the daemon in, but also get rid of the puppet’s huge shadow that has inevitably been cast by the fire’s light.” He adds: “There were, of course, some instances where we had to use the puppet passes for VFX, just because the actors’ performances were better, which is totally understandable.” The VFX team weren’t just confined to their dark rooms for this production. They were on-set each day and brought with them photorealistic animals, which they’d place in-scene during the prelights to work out
how to light and shade the daemons. Some of the animals were also licenced taxidermy, which helped ensure the lighting reference on the animal’s fur was authentic. Brown says: “If you look back to the 2007 film, which for its time was incredible – I think it won an Oscar for VFX – but there wasn’t all that much interaction between humans and daemons, because it’s so expensive. And, unless you take this approach – the approach that Russell’s team took – it would be impossible for the animators to do their job to the best of their ability.” Dodgson adds: “As well as doing our lighting references, we were on-set to LiDAR scan them and do colour charts. We also had chrome balls and greys balls that helped us understand the direction in which the light was travelling, and we used these each time a scene involving a daemon was shot. The director, DOPs and actors were really respectful of our process, because they knew that if we didn’t get this stuff, the CGI wouldn’t look good.”
IMAGES Behind the scenes, showing the actors with their daemon puppets
16 DEF I N I T ION | DECEMBER 20 1 9
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