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Mark Day and Harry Potter are probably on a first name basis. He’s edited four of the Harry Potter films, starting with Order of the Phoenix

HULLFISH: I loved the erumpant scene (one of the fantastic beasts) in the zoo. Tell me about building the suspense of that scene.

DAY: I really like that scene too. It has very good visual effects and the erumpant is a very lovable, flirtatious and fantastic creature which alongside Eddie Redmayne who plays Newt and Dan Fogler who plays Jacob makes for a sumptuous feast because it starts off slowly as Newt tries to seduce the erumpant back into his case with his slightly surreal dance, and then Jacob, with the aid of an escaped seal, spills the erumpant musk onto his protective armour (don’t ask, just watch the film!) and that’s when she smells him and the chase begins. This then builds and builds gradually into an almost musical crescendo which culminates on the Central Park ice rink as the erumpant gets closer and closer to Jacob with Newt in pursuance before she is recaptured into the case having narrowly missed out licking Jacob’s face.

Now that sequence obviously took quite a while to get right and I did numerous versions myself using part live action and part pre-viz to get the rhythm of the scene working and as you know, you try things out a number of different ways. Then David and I worked together on it over the months with gradually more and more sophisticated post-viz animation being supplied by the visual fx department and eventually it found its natural length and rhythm and played very well.

It was quite a bit longer originally because there was a lot more that happened within the scene. But it felt a little too long in the context of the whole film and so we also referred to our ‘filmed audience recruit screenings’ which Warner Bros provided us with in the cutting room (because we were unable to go to some of the test screenings due to the schedule, which is a shame as you cannot beat ‘feeling’ the vibe in the room with a live audience) and whenever we were unsure as to whether it was the right thing to do we would check out the audience to see if they were enjoying it or shifting in their seats and that was an incredibly useful tool to have as there was one beat in the original version in which the audience seemed to shuffle about a bit, so we pared it down until it felt like the right length.

HULLFISH: Let’s talk about temp music. I specifically noted a track in the score after the strudel scene where Newt and Kowalksi are having dinner in the girls’ apartment.

DAY: Yes, that’s right. When they first meet Queenie in the Goldstein apartment.

The source track ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’ was being played on a gramophone. In fact Alison Sudol who played the character Queenie (and it was her first day of filming) had that playing on set to get into the character and because it worked so well and we could clear it for usage I laid it on the scene when I was editing because I loved it so much and David agreed. It worked really well with her character. From there James Newton Howard segued into his lovely score as the apple strudel was being magically constructed!”

HULLFISH: This is a strange question, but where did the edit start? There were so many motion graphics and logos and stuff before we saw film….or did you have to cut all that together with pre-vis and post-vis?

DAY: You’re referring to the newspaper montage at the beginning. That all evolved during post production actually. Originally it was used later on in the film as scripted, however one of the producers had the good idea that we could use it at the beginning of the film, not only to familiarize people once again with the Harry Potter world but also it is a useful way of getting across a lot of expositional information in an interesting way which is what we needed to do. For example, it showed us the name Grindelwald (the protagonist in the film) a number of times which subconsciously lodges in people’s minds and gives the film a slightly darker tone, whereas in the original script the film started with Newt arriving by boat in New York and it was all quite jolly. Now we introduce it with this sinister character killing a number of aurors and we catch a distinctive glimpse of the back of his head (this turns out to be Grindelwald who will be played by Johnny Depp in the next film and we see him transform from the character Graves played by Colin Farrell near the end) which then segues into the newspaper montage ending up on an image of the Statue of Liberty, so instead of just this slightly eccentric British man with a suitcase arriving on a boat we have introduced a number of themes that will resonate throughout the film.

HULLFISH: Tell me about the fight with the obscurus at the end. The final battle had a beautiful, musical rhythm to it. I really love the rhythm of that scene.

DAY: Thank you, Steve, I’m really pleased about that. These things take time to get right and I did countless versions until we found the right rhythm. Having said that I do have pre-viz to work with whilst I’m editing and I intercut that with the live action footage of the main characters which gradually builds up the scene and then when we are happy with it, we turn that over to the VFX department who in turn work on the edit and they were giving us back quite sophisticated post-viz. Then eventually when we ‘semi-lock’ the scene that goes out to the vendor who work on the individual shots that we then start to receive over the ensuing months and in time they become these very impressive shots which are ‘finalled’ after many viewings and comments and incorporated into the main edit so it’s a very time-consuming process that evolves over the months that we work on the film. We also had the advantage of having the Credence character played by Ezra Miller who gave us some fantastic motion capture footage of him emoting and screaming which was incorporated into the obscurus visual fx and this gave it a unique, interesting and beautiful look.

HULLFISH: There was quite a bit of interactive lighting in the movie, was it difficult to maintain continuity with that?

DAY: That can cause problems sometimes obviously. For example, there was a scene in the Pentagram office when Tina (Katherine Waterston) shows up with the suitcase and interrupts the meeting. Philippe Rousselot (the D.O.P.) had used interactive lighting above the crowd that was following the dead body of senator Shaw (who had recently been killed by the obscurus) Now you know how scenes change during the edit and lines are excised or the scene is restructured in some way or another so there was no continuity to the lighting at all and we had to cheat it in the grade with the help of Peter Doyle our colourist and also visual fx helped out with some of it.

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