As most of you know, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I was nominated for 2 Academy Awards.  The awards were given out tonight and the first award to be presented was Art Direction.  Deathly Hallows lost the award to Alice in Wonderland. Helena Bonham Carter was also nominated for Best Supporting actress and she lost to Melissa Leo from The Fighter. Next up was Best Original Score where Alexandre Desplat was nominated.  Unfortunately he lost to The Social Network. Finally, the film was also nominated for Visual Effects and lost to Inception.

They also showed a mix of movies where they turned certain parts into songs and Deathly Hallows was one of those featured. If a video makes its way online I’ll be sure to post it.

But don’t lose hope everyone! Deathly Hallows: Part II can always pull a Lord of the Rings: Return of the King and be nominated for 11 awards and win them all!

Playbill has released the final part of Daniel Radcliffe’s interview where he discusses theatre and more! You can watch below.

Playbill has posted the second video in their three part series where Daniel Radcliffe discusses theatre, acting and more! You can watch part one here!

People Tree have uploaded a new behind the scenes video of Emma’s latest People Tree collection being shot to their YouTube that you can watch below.

Also, thanks to Emma-Watson.net we have some new photos from the shoot.

Nominations for the 37th Annual Saturn Awards have been announced and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I has been nominated for five awards!  Those nominations may be seen below.

Thanks SS!

The VFX Supervisor for the Harry Potter Films, Tim Burke, recently sat down with StudioDaily to discuss the visual effects for the Harry Potter series. Some snippets may be read below.

F&V: What were the hardest shots to accomplish on Deathly Hallows, Part 1? I think the hardest things were the characters. The creatures and Dobby. People had to relate to Dobby, to empathize with Dobby to believe he would die. People are used to seeing good and bad CG characters. If Dobby didn’t look like he had a soul, we would have lost the emotional moment at the end of the film. I thought Dobby would be the hardest character, but with the skills of our brilliant animators at Framestore, he wasn’t that difficult to execute. And we had brilliant reference performances, which helped us nail the characters.

The hardest shots were the abstract and conceptual shots of the destruction of the evil horcrux creature. It was a lot of work for Rising Sun. What does it look like to rip a soul apart? David Yates had it in his head toward the end of shooting, and we had to invent something. All those subjective things are open to interpretation. But we kept sticking to it and translated his ideas into Houdini effects. We drove the faces, which are hidden, through facial capture from Ralph Fiennes. We used Mova, the same motion-capture system used for Benjamin Button, to drive the distorted faces of Voldermort into this writhing mass.

F&V: When you think back to the previous films, what were the hardest effects? We’ve always pushed all the available technology at the time as hard as we could. When I think over the group of films, the giant in the fifth film wasn’t our best and there were all sorts of reasons why he didn’t work. The character changed halfway through the film and we had to throw out all our reference because the director didn’t like it. So all of a sudden we didn’t have a character. When we lost that we were drowning, so as a result, all those shots feel hard. I’ll hold up my hand and say it didn’t look good enough.

We’ve had other difficult things that did work. The Hippogriff was an incredible challenge to pull off, and it was the star of the last film. But the abstract subjective effects are the hardest. And all the Potter films have had them. It isn’t like matching a real environment that you have to keep working on until it looks real. If you’re destroying a tortured horcrux soul, that’s hard.

F&V: How did the role of visual effects change in this film compared to earlier films? […] For Part 2, we’ve done away with Hogwarts. It was such a major job to stage the battle of Hogwarts, and we had to do it in different stages of production. We had shots with complex linking camera moves from wide overviews, to flying into windows and interior spaces. So we took the plunge at the end of 2008 and started rebuilding the school digitally with Double Negative. It’s taken two years – getting renders out, texturing every facet of the building, constructing interiors to see through windows, building a destruction version of the school. We can design shots with the knowledge that we have this brilliant digital miniature that we can do anything with. With a practical Hogwarts, we would have shot it last summer and been so tied down. Instead, as David Yates finds the flow and structure, we are able to handle new concepts and ideas.

Thanks SS!