One of the distinctive elements to come out of the design phase was a papery, grainy background which bound the images together well and added to the overall ethereal feel. This had to be translated into something that would work with moving cameras and not be 'pasted over the top' in comp.

Character, prop and set assets were look developed in the standard way for commercial production, with a small team of texture and Zbrush artists working up the detail - renders were generated to produce a typical array of passes for comping in Nuke: RGB Light and shadow; depth; incidence; to name just a few.

"The sequence was a compositors dream job," says Russell Dodgson, "technical, challenging and with an ever-evolving creative process that required a lot of 'out of the box' thinking."

Due to the relatively long shot durations, cloth simulation on death's cloak and the bride's dress proved challenging. The brief in the case of Death was to create an ethereal otherworldly movement that felt natural in this stylised world. The team decided that the wizard characters' cloth would have a stiff puppet look to further distinguish them from Death.

Martin Aufinger used Houdini for the magical bridge forming sequence. In order to further the gritty, hand made look; the team experimented with lowering the frames rate on elements in shots.

"I had preliminary meetings with David [Yates]and Stuart Craig, the production designer. I dug up a couple of images and one of the early references that we responded to was from Lotte Reiniger for her scissor cut out, silhouette style of animation. And there was something naïve and very graphical that David responded to. So I came away with that and was already fascinated with Asian shadow plays and puppetry -- very crudely articulated puppets on sticks.

I thought that merging the two things would look wonderful. But there was always something that bugged me a little bit about all of these references. They were heavily 2D in their craft and I was very aware of breaking the flow of the movie, and so it was very important that we keep the language of cameras and not lose the motion of the cinematic experience as a Potter movie. I tried to devise a way to think of that visual style but in 3D.

So we worked on some concepts and once the look was locked, Framestore came on board to produce the piece and we refined the look with their illustrators and made it work with the tools we needed to use because obviously the floating camera through layers of paper and transposing shadows and having 360-degree cameras became quite a challenge.