To Great Effect

(Above: Tim Burton's Corpse Bride)

Here it is, the most insipid film critique anyone can offer: “[Insert title] was OK, but the book was so much better.” C’mon now, it goes without saying that Hollywood—even if it had all the cash in the world to throw at a feature—couldn’t possibly rival the dizzying heights of a person’s untethered imagination. But that’ll never stop filmmakers from taking up the challenge of dressing fantastical thoughts in flesh and fabric. And it’ll never render the visual feats they accomplish any less spectacular. Paste speaks to three different special-effects experts who toil unrecognized behind the scenes, bottling the human imagination’s magic and offering it to breathless audiences everywhere.

Wandless Magic

The special-effects wizardry of John Richardson (Special Effects Supervisor, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire)

By Amanda Petrusich

Contemporary big-budget filmmaking is an undeniably knotty pursuit: evolutions in pre- and post-production have significantly altered the way movies are made and received. And now, special-effects supervisors—commanded to astound their viewers in new and unexpected ways—often inadvertently engineer a film’s entire aesthetic. British-born special-effects authority John Richardson—with a career boasting over 40 years of service (beginning with 1968’s Duffy) and four Oscar nominations (including a 1986 win for Alien)—is remarkably well-versed in the evolution of his craft. “The industry started to change dramatically after the first Star Wars. Suddenly, there was an awful lot of money available. In some ways, life is much easier now because we can do things we could never do before. But at the same time, life is more difficult, because we’re doing things we’ve never done.”

As a blanket term, “special effects” refers to effects produced on-set, and excludes enhancements added later (computer-generated supplements are left up to visual-effects technicians). “I do all of the practical or physical effects, assuring that the shot is in the camera,” Richardson says. “My team has done most of our work by the end of production. But we’ll still get called upon to provide the visual-effects side with a lot of elements that they need to put into their computers. Everything that you see onscreen, generally, is a huge mishmash of everybody’s work coming together.”

As special-effects supervisor for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth installment in the wickedly popular wizarding series, Richardson is singularly responsible for the design and implementation of plenty of bizarre (some never-before-imagined) constructions, including fire-breathing dragons, Death Eaters, zipping Quidditch brooms, giant water tanks and more. Given the staggering success of the Harry Potter novels, Richardson’s job was only compounded by the pressure of those millions of eager young (and not-so-young) minds, each overflowing with their own visual interpretation of the story. Still, Richardson appreciates the inimitability of author JK Rowling’s vision. “There’s a maze in the film—a very tall, bushy maze, which comes to life. Visual effects did a lot of that manipulation in the computer, but I still had to build a 35-foot-long section of maze that would ripple and open and close and try to crush the occupants. The maze was operated by hydraulics, and run by a computer. We could pre-program variations, make the whole maze squeeze together. Ultimately, we just had to make it look like it was alive.”

Richardson has worked on the previous Harry Potter films, and is currently knee-deep in the fifth. While impressed by the professionalism of his young subjects (“They are very, very good at what they do,” he gushes), working for and with children presents its own unique challenges to an effects team. “When you’re building mechanical rigs, or doing fires, or explosions, or all the other things we’re called on to do—it’s hard in an environment where you’re surrounded by children. It adds an intensity to the whole thing.”