His Dark Materials tried to make the Spectres look different from Dementors
Spectres are shapeless being that basically suck out your soul. When designing them, His Dark Materials wanted to avoid the obvious comparison.
His Dark Materials has quite literally introduced viewers to an entirely new world during its second season — and with that comes new threats. In particular, the Spectres are looming over Lyra and Will as they stay in Cittàgazze. From what we know of these spirit-like creatures, they attack anyone who has reached puberty — basically, anyone whose Daemon has “settled.” They do seem to have a bit in common with Harry Potter’s Dementors — including their penchant for sucking out a person’s soul — even if the VFX team worked hard to set them apart from the beings who guard Azkaban.
Speaking with Den of Geek, Framestore VFX supervisor, Russell Dodgson, talked about the difficulties bringing Spectres to life as Philip Pullman described them in his His Dark Materials books. After all, the beings are described as transparent at times, and nearly invisible in certain light. That’s difficult to capture onscreen.
“You can describe things that you can’t quite picture and that makes it more magical,” Dodgson explained, “but then you try and put it on screen and it’s like, oh! It’s such hard work. Our 3D VFX supervisor on that, Rob Harrington, has definitely gone greyer doing the Spectres. I was really trying to find a way to not end up making Dementors.”
That’s why the VFX team wound up making the Spectres grey as opposed to black — which very much resembles the Dementors of the Potterverse — or white, which didn’t work visually. Making them grey — and having them constantly in motion — set them apart from similar creatures seen onscreen and kept them somewhat true to Pullman’s vision.
“Grey is good because it makes them more unique,” Dodgson said, “but there’s a reason people don’t do grey monsters a lot, and that’s because in different lighting conditions, grey becomes whatever color the environment is, so that was a unique challenge but it was worth it.”
Fans are likely to see more of the Spectres as season 2 continues, especially since the story has hyped them up as a serious threat to our main characters. “A Spectre is something half in the mind,” said production designer Joel Collins. “It’s the anxiety of them as much as what they do. They’re a very complicated thing that come from the fabric and the tears between the worlds. They are the bad side of cutting between worlds. They’re the warning. They’re the price you pay.”
Hopefully, our beloved characters won’t pay too steep a price. We’ll have to keep watching to discover how the Spectres impact the larger plot of the series — but right now, it certainly seems like they could be a key component of the mysteries surrounding daemons, Dust, and becoming an adult.
dark. Next. 10 things His Dark Materials season two needs to get right
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