Chapter 23X: Rutting Room Floor
Leavesden Studios, UK. October 2006.
“Oh, hi Mark!” Ah, the editing studio. The workshop of the Harry Potter franchise’s very own Da Vinci, Mark Day.
Here and here alone, boys became men, the ugly transformed into the beautiful, and a lack of chemistry could be turned into an entire pharmacy.
The screenplay, the acting, the filming were just the giant slab of marble these artists sculpted into everlasting masterpieces or unending shame.
I’d been coming here on my off hours to learn how this was done.
One of the first lessons I’d learned was that the longer someone had to spend chiseling away at your particular section of stone, the worse your performance likely was. Setting Leo and High Renaissance beauty standards aside, the last thing I wanted was Mark Day abandoning me and the editing team having to go the way of Michelangelo hammering away at me till I resembled David - specifically under the fig leaf.
So here I was, poised and posed like the thinker, to evaluate my competence and to learn new skills.
“Don’t bother taking one more step unless you show me proof that you’ve got the goods.” Behold the back-alley brokering that bolstered the bureaucracy of this corrupt system.
In other words, yes, I’d bribed my way in here.
Autumn was in terminal freefall. The crisp, brown leaves dropping brought along a stiff breeze with them that wafted the warm steam to Mark’s nose as I waved my weighty tiffin. “Sunday brunch is served, courtesy of Cadbury.”
Mark swiveled his chair and sucked in a deep breath. “That smells like the good craic. Dimmies and dumplings?”
“Straight from Hong Kong’s opium dens. If the story of her time working for a prominent British family pre-handover is true.”
Names remained redacted even if recipes weren’t.
“Bless that wonderful woman.” The wheelie chair beside him rolled its way over to me with a quick kick of Mark’s leg. “Pay the toll and park your rump. We’ve got a busy day ahead.”
As Mark unclipped the tiffin and stuffed his cheeks full of shrimp shumai, like a particularly paranoid squirrel preparing for hibernation, all I was left with was the thermos full of pu’er tea. Neither Cadbury nor the many women’s magazines were lying when they said the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach.
I wasn’t fibbing when I said I read Good Housekeeping.
I let him have the lot since we still had filming left, which means my diet was still in effect.
The plastic wheels of my swivel chair rattled against the tile as I scooted and pushed up against Mark’s workstation.
Monitors, switchboards, buttons, and a whole range of unidentifiable paraphernalia mimicked the complex cockpit of the concord. It took everything I had not to extend my finger, press, and shout, ‘what does this button do?’
Mark’s timely intervention tripped up my intrusive thoughts. “Let’s recap our lesson from last time. With all this tech in front of you, why is it we still use a clapper?”
“Well, originally, when editors actually used to gather and cut film, the clapper would show a spike on the audio track. But these days it’s all digital, so they sync up the audio and the visuals with a Timecode.” I rattled off like a good little student sat in the front row of the class.
“Which means what?”
“So you have a reliable way of identifying and matching all your audio and video from all the different cameras and mics for any given scene.”
“And because of that, I’ve got five-to-six angles to choose from when I’m constricting any shot. So now, let’s put that into practice.” He shifted away from the monitor that had Adobe Premiere running - the main editing software used for the movie and yanked out the keyboard that was linked to another screen. “This next bit of kit I’m going to show you is called Autodesk Maya. It’s where we do all the CGI heavy lifting before transferring it over to the final edit.” My eyes swam across the screen as the keyboard clacked. “You remember who we sent the Dumbles versus Voldie fight to?”
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
We worked with several different vendors for all the CGI and VFX shots, including Industrial Light and Magic, most famous for delivering the childhood for everyone one since the 70s. Star Wars, Indiana Jones, ET, Terminator, and in future several Marvel projects too. But for this specific sequence we contracted with, “The Moving Picture Co.”
“Correct. And we’ve just got the early composites for the ministry fight.” By which he meant the grey PS1 graphic concepts.
“Let’s see what we’re dealing with.”
[The green shine of an Avada Kedavra painted my face as I stared down the rapidly encroaching spell from Voldemort. I accepted my death.
But then with a deafening gong! The headless golden statue of the wizard in the fountain leapt from its plinth, landed in front of me, shattered the tile beneath its feet, and absorbed the killing curse.
A large grey facsimile of the fountain wizard had replaced the burly bloke in the green chroma-key and lifts.
I was grappled around my arms and torso, hefted off the ground, and rushed away from the epicenter of the duel. Green flared again, but this time Dumbledore strode out of the fireplace.
As he headed for Voldemort, our paths crossed while I was being carried back. Our eyes met.
“Dumbledore! Avada Kedavra!” Voldemort stabbed his wand and screeched. Dumbledore’s beard billowed, his eyes kept glued to mine even as the green reflection of the curse burned in his vision.]
Tap. Pause. “Here’s my immediate instinct. This brief glance you and Gambon share is the torch of the current battle passing from one to the other. So, the option I have for the very next shot is to keep the camera closer to you to observe the action or splice the footage seamlessly with the wide shot camera using Dumbledore’s apparation as the transition.
“The latter sounds more dynamic, I reckon.”
“Then let’s check the timecode and swap the camera.”
[Dumbledore remained in frame as if the previous shot was the same. He stayed centered even as I, and the surrounding ministry, blurred with a thunderous crack!
The scene suddenly shifted to the other side of the impromptu arena as Dumbledore apparated. He landed smoothly, with a whirl of his cloak, on his feet as the background showed the vile, viridian, curse sail safely past me where Dumbledore previously stood. Teleportation magic, you know? “It was foolish to come here tonight, Tom.” Dumbledore stood abruptly behind Voldemort. “The aurors are on their way.”
Calmly, Voldemort craned his neck first, then the rest of his body twisted around to face Dumbledore. He grandly gestured with his wand resting on his palm, face up. “By which time I shall be gone, and you dead!”
With a flourish of his wand, the rest of the statues around the fountain sprang to life and struck down on Voldemort like lightning.
Voldemort apparated away before the one armed centaur could stamp him and fired off an acrid cloud of darkness.
Dark curses met transfiguration as Dumbledore, with a twirl of his wand above his head, caught the head of the spell and transformed it into a whip of roiling flame that slashed its way at Voldemort. It coiled around him, momentarily hiding his form before Voldemort wrenched control of the fire, inhaled it and exhaled it into a giant, furious, hissing serpent made of cursed flames. Fiendfyre.
The statues immediately formed a bulwark in front of Dumbledore, deflecting the snake’s first strike even as they melted into slag. Voldemort took that dip in concentration as an opportunity to cast another killing curse at me.
The headless wizard shielded me one last time as it burst into shrapnel and dropped me painfully to my knees. I still had the bruises from that one.
The added CGI complemented the fans and explosive charges that were used to create the tumultuous environment during the battle. My gaze never wavered from the ensuing war, even as the world around me in the scene descended into chaos. I was sweaty, shaking, and in more than just a slight shock, but I couldn’t peel my eyes away.
Dumbledore banished Fiendfyre, forcing Voldemort to shield himself. He wrested control of the fountain, washed Voldemort away in a tidal wave of force, and trapped him in the orb of swirling water.
Voldemort fought fiercely. He clawed at the water to escape its crushing weight. “Nyeeaahhh!” came (Ralph’s) Voldemort’s signature yell. The water ball burst. The deluge turned into a rain of shattered glass that zoomed towards both Dumbledore and I.
Voldemort fell to his feet, as the last of Dumbledore’s spells harmlessly transformed the cutting edges into soft sand.]
“Not too shabby, eh? I think I’ll send this back to MPC and see how it looks with the full lighting and renders. So what should we work on next?”
I had full faith in the editing now, but there was still one aspect I wanted to take a gander at. “Show me how colour correction works.”
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