Lord Voldemort's rather peculiar and destructive death in
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 to no surprise was one of several concepts considered by the production and visual effects team during post-production (one scenario even showed Harry standing over Voldemort's intact dead body).
Moving Picture Company VFX supervisor Greg Butler revealed in a new interview this week that another proposed suggestion for Voldemort's demise at Hogwarts would be for him to transform into a tree-like statue once hit by the Avada Kedavra from the Elder Wand. Eventually, from that tree figure Voldemort would have eventually disintegrated - something that was more director David Yates' suggestion at the end. More can be read below.
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Greg Butler: “We invented new visual stuff, and we went through a whole bunch of concept art. There’s even some crazy stuff where he becomes this blackened, charcoal-y tree shape that’s growing and then that tree turns to ash and blows away in the wind ... that’s how far down the road we went with some of these designs, trying to come up with something you really couldn’t miss.”
“What we did was there’s a part where he’s sitting in the courtyard, and then he turns into this blackened shrub-thing with fingery branches, and then I think we went larger and made it into a tree shape because we had a lot of screen space to fill,” Butler explained.
Several ideas were thrown around by the team to get to the final cut shown in the clip below.
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Butler: “Somebody brought up the idea, ‘I like him there in the middle of this whole thing, but can something be rising up off of him?’ We started doing little black particles coming up off of him as if that’s the dark energy, his evilness is drifting off of him like some kind of gritty smoke.”
“Now we’re showing him going up into the air and dispersing because you don’t want the audience to think that he’s just going to show up again after he collects himself and be on the other side of the courtyard. He has to actually disperse into the wind.”
We thought, ‘What are we gonna do for the close up?’ And we thought of the idea that his skin peels off, but it peels off in such a thin, onion-skin kind of tissue that there would be multiple layers. It would pick up in the wind.”
Director David Yates told MPC they needed a “big, epic shot” looking down with all of the particles coming towards the camera, which would show the death from a god’s eye view.
Of the final death, Butler says, “it was quiet. It was peaceful. It was physical but also a little magical.”
Of course the death of Voldemort in the actual
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows book was written, by J.K. Rowling, as Voldemort getting hit by the Elder Wand's Killing Spell and collapsing to the ground, body still remaining in one piece ("Tom Riddle hit the floor with a mundane finality").