How His Dark Materials Brings Its Daemon Menagerie to Life

The biggest challenge of adapting Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy from the page to the screen was figuring out how to bring the daemons to life. Every character has a unique mystical animal companion that exists as a manifestation of their souls, and the visual effects team needed to devise a method to render every kind of creature imaginable, from a tiny mouse to a hulking armored polar bear.

"The daemons aren't animals. They have a human consciousness and a focus, and I think that's the most important thing to get," explains Russell Dodgson, VFX Supervisor. "They're not literal. They are spiritually animals."

So they started with a core of puppeteering and built their effects from there, forming a process with a budget "unheard of for TV," which included spending six months animating a climactic bear fight. 

His Dark Materials Season 2 returns with its Season 2 premiere Monday November 16th at 9:00 PM ET on HBO.

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Andy Hunsaker has a head full of sitcom gags and nerd-genre lore, and can be followed @AndyHunsaker if you're into that sort of thing.