Evolving Quidditch

Like any good franchise, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets mainly offered the same ingredients that made the first Harry Potter film so successful. However, many of those ingredients were reformulated for the second go-around. In particular: the so-called “Quidditch” match — a sort of mid-air lacrosse match on flying broomsticks — a sequence prominently featured in both films.

Bill George, ILM's visual effects supervisor for Chamber of Secrets, explains:

“On the first film, they did extensive animatics, and on a stage, matched those animatics by shooting actors with motion-control cameras. They did a great job getting actors on brooms to move in ways that matched the animatics. For this film, we did use animatics and pre-viz, but this time, we used them more as a guide for the Quidditch match. Instead of using motion-control, we used a handheld crane to shoot the actors on stage. That made it more free-form and not as static, more like realistic action.”

Director Chris Columbus also wanted the backgrounds of the Hogwarts school campus to be more integrated with the foregrounds of Quidditch stadium — creating the feel of an on-campus stadium. ILM, therefore, spent more time matching stadium lighting to the lighting of campus backgrounds.

“In the first movie, the stadium seemed far away, disconnected,” George says. “So we cheated the geography somewhat to make it seem closer, giving us more parallax of the trees and mountains in the background as the young boys fly around on brooms. That made the whole thing seem more multi-dimensional. That's why we used location matte paintings more extensively this time — about 80 matte paintings for the eight-minute sequence.”