NEWT’S SHED There was much discussion about how ‘tailored’ Newt’s world should be. In keeping with the notion that his primary concern is keeping the beasts happy and safe, he does just enough and doesn’t worry too much about clean lines and perfect edges. The unfinished border of the wood hill supports this idea. DP
My first introduction to the wizarding world of Harry Potter was when my twelve-year-old son was reading the books – he loved them and would not look up from the page until the particular instalment was finished. I had also heard from friends, who were reading the books to their younger children, who admitted that they were ‘actually quite good’ and that they couldn’t put them down after the kids had gone to sleep.
Eventually I read them myself and saw that, even though they were aware of and occasionally influenced by fantasy books that had gone before, J.K. Rowling’s world was very particular – familiar and real and contemporary, even when they were full of magic and wonder and mystery. It is this placing of the extraordinary alongside the very ordinary that makes her invented world so interesting to design and it was the guiding design philosophy in the early Harry Potter films as well as in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
Stuart Craig, our production designer and guiding light in the Potter art department during the early 2000s, often reminded us to keep our designs ‘real’ – the magic would be more extraordinary and believable when framed by a world that had weight and structure and history. Hogwarts is extraordinary but we believe the architecture even when it is as strange as Dumbledore’s triple tower.
I took these lessons with me to other films and franchises and found myself often quoting Stuart and referring back to him and the world he had evolved for all eight Potter films. The lessons learned about design were universal and long lasting.
So I was delighted when Stuart called me a decade later to ask if l would return to the fold for the latest J.K. Rowling wizarding adventure directed by David Yates and produced by David Heyman. Both Davids shared Stuart’s belief in grounding our designs in reality when teasing out the ‘design narrative’* of a character, creature or place. J.K. Rowling’s wonderfully evocative writing made our task much easier, and David Yates was wholly supportive of the approach: he would often say ‘it must be believable – it must be intuitively true’.
* The ‘design narrative’ is very hard to explain in a single sentence without sounding pretentious, but is very important. It is finding the story of a design. A simple example is a tree blown by the wind. What is the tree trying to do? It’s trying to grab light from the sun. How does it do this? It grows towards the sun. What is holding it back? Gravity and the wind and the earth. Once you have these story elements then designing is much easier.
In 2005, I attended a lecture Stuart delivered in Berlin about how the world of design was becoming digital and that film art departments should prepare for and embrace the new technologies. In the ten years since that lecture, tools developed for post-production – such as 3D set design, digital sculpting, photographic compositing techniques and animation – became available to concept artists and the pre-production team. The art department I joined for Fantastic Beasts had space for the traditional and the new: the draughting tables and pencils still favoured by a generation of designers, whose depth of experience was irreplaceable, and the newer, tech-savvy, mostly younger artists who sat in front of computer screens. Stuart was comfortable with both because the rules for good design are always the same, whether pencil on paper or pixels on a screen.
In the intervening years, the number of films that needed concept artists had expanded enormously as the studios invested in more and more big-budget visual effects-heavy films. And there were many more concept artists – the typical art department’s two or three became six or seven, but the costume department also had their team, as did props, and creatures; in fact, any department that saw the value in having a design idea presented with visuals from sketch to fully rendered illustration. The biggest supplier of concept art became the VFX (visual effects) department, which split and branched in to several different teams attached to the various VFX houses all over the world. The VFX artists were now integral to the pre-production design phase of any film. And on Fantastic Beasts we were all on site at Leavesden sharing and evolving the design together, guided by Stuart, the Davids** and J.K. Rowling herself.
** We did call David Yates and David Heyman ‘the Davids’. ‘Do you think it will get past the Davids?’ was the most common question about a design.
We creatives who were lucky enough to have spent time guided by Stuart at Leavesden Studios, just outside but not too close to the distracting bustle of London, in our very own Hogwarts, were given the time and space to be the designers that J.K. Rowling’s wizarding world needed and deserved.
This book is a small sample of all that wonderful creativity. Ten years ago we had hundreds of images to choose from; now I had thousands. And in selecting from them it was a fantastic opportunity for me to re-connect with all of the artists and gather their thoughts on what inspired them to create the images.
I have elected to present this gallery of their art in chapters, to allow you to experience each key element of the film within its own frame, as it were. And within each chapter I have included work that showcases the evolution of the creative process: from the earliest sketches and designs produced as we sought to find the best, most imaginative way of expressing J.K. Rowling’s vision on screen, to more confident art created when we knew we were close to capturing the perfect beast design or location. It was a lengthy and exacting process – where some creatures would appear before us almost like magic but others would prove very hard to find – but the journey was always a fascinating and rewarding one.
We begin with New York City (p.12), and the sights and wonders of its locations inhabited by New Yorkers both No-Maj and magical, and the extraordinary re-creation of the city during its rise in the 1920s. Everything from the dockside customs hall and bank to the splendour of Shaw Tower and grimy streets where ordinary folk like Jacob live in their tenement buildings. All this and more was created thanks to the talents of concept artists Peter Popken, Tom Wingrove and Hayley Easton-Street.
These same talents would help a wider team capture Stuart Craig’s vision of MACUSA’s wonderful headquarters hidden within the Woolworth Building (p. 54), where the dazzling open spaces of the upper floors sit above the altogether darker, subterranean levels. Newt’s case – and the fantastic beasts housed inside it – would prove a very different location to help realize, and the two sections on pp. 82–211 showcase the work of many artists as they explored and finally nailed the look of the extraordinary beasts that Newt is taking care of, and the environments in which they live.
We are then swept into the seedy underworld speakeasy of The Blind Pig, haunt of magical lowlife keen to avoid the attentions of Aurors, while the goblin house band fills the joint with jazz music (p. 212).
As we reach our climax, we come face to face with the Obscurus (p.238), the dark force which is threatening to destroy the city unless Newt can find a way to stop it.
Finally, it needs to be acknowledged that the concept art is not the only ‘art’ produced by the art department and of course it is not the only design, just a part of it, like an iceberg peeking above the water. Beautiful plans and elevations, fantastic card models and miniatures, maquettes, graphics and of course the sets themselves, the scenic paintings, sign writing and monumental sculptures – but that’s for another book.
This is about the images. Let them take you on a journey.