There are several reports on the internet today reporting on yesterday’s tour and talk at the visual-effects house Rhythm & Hues – who are working on The Golden Compass. Last week’s trailer was shown again, along with additional footage of the house’s graphics work for the film. One of the nine graphics companies working on the movie, Rhythm & Hues primarily worked on the daemons. Movieweb have a lengthy transcript of the event.

The company revealed that director Chris Weitz had asked them to give daemons something “different” that would mark them out from normal animals, such as have been seen on film numerous times before. Experimenting with characteristics like mild transparency, they eventually decided upon giving the daemons a multicoloured sheen to their fur. Co-visual effects supervisor Raymond Chen spoke of the need to retain some sort of consistency amongst Pantalaimon’s many different forms, explaining how they modelled the daemon with a “little dark area around his eyes […] we tried to give a little hint of that in all of his forms.”

With the recent decision to cut the book’s concluding sequence from the film, the ending the effects house had been working on will be shifted to The Subtle Knife. “We had a long period of time where we developed this stuff. It’s very matte-painting-heavy and effects-heavy, and we did a lot of work for it,” said Mike Meaker, the film’s art director.

Visual-effects producer Gary Nolin said of the change, “The decision was made to have the movie end slightly earlier than the first book ends, so there’s a scene at the end of first book […] the plans right now I believe are to start the second movie with that scene”. He clarified it will be the “scene that takes place at the North Pole, with the aurora borealis and the window into the new world.”

Read more with the full transcript.