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How His Dark Materials Brings Its Daemon Menagerie to Life

  • The biggest challenge of adapting Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy from the page to the screen was figuring out how to bring the daemons to life. Every character has a unique mystical animal companion that exists as a manifestation of their souls, and the visual effects team needed to devise a method to render every kind of creature imaginable, from a tiny mouse to a hulking armored polar bear.

    "The daemons aren't animals. They have a human consciousness and a focus, and I think that's the most important thing to get," explains Russell Dodgson, VFX Supervisor. "They're not literal. They are spiritually animals."

    So they started with a core of puppeteering and built their effects from there, forming a process with a budget "unheard of for TV," which included spending six months animating a climactic bear fight. 

    His Dark Materials Season 2 returns with its Season 2 premiere Monday November 16th at 9:00 PM ET on HBO.

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    Andy Hunsaker has a head full of sitcom gags and nerd-genre lore, and can be followed @AndyHunsaker if you're into that sort of thing.

    TOPICS: His Dark Materials