Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

DNEG was proud to return to the Harry Potter universe and the Fantastic Beasts series for ‘Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald’, delivering over 300 shots across some of the movie’s key sequences.

Our VFX team’s key work included the entire third act of the film, as well as all the establishing exterior shots of Hogwarts, the Boggart shots in the Defense Against The Dark Arts classroom, and Grindelwald’s Obscurus vision in his hideout.

For the third and final act, our teams brought the magic to life with the underground amphitheatre and graveyard environments, crowd work, complex fire FX, creature animation and digi-doubles.

The Lesstrange Amphitheatre environment was created using a large partial set build which included the floor, platform, and a section of seating. We replicated the practical seating section digitally to create the 360 environment and created the ceiling entirely in CG. We also expanded the 500 on-set extras to a crowd of 3000.

Our FX and animation teams took on the challenge of creating the blue fire ring, the fire creatures, and the disintegration death effects - which involved body-tracking of the actors on-set to be transitioned to digi-doubles that were shredded into small fabric sims and particles.

The fire dragons were a particularly challenging element for our team and involved a long development process. We explored multiple different creature forms with our concept team to identify how their mouths, horns, wings and appendages could emerge from the fire and smoke in a dynamic way. In post, we devised new techniques to get the right sense of scale and speed for the creatures, depending on their actions and how fast they were moving, and meticulously groomed the fire to work cohesively in each shot.