His Dark Materials just wouldn’t have been able to come to life if it wasn’t for one of the most important parts of Philip Pullman’s world – the daemons that stand side-by-side with every character.

The physical embodiment of each person’s soul, daemons embody the true nature of each character, which when playing against real life actors, can become a task of itself for everyone involved in the series creation.

But thankfully, the visual effects team went above and beyond to bring the creatures to life – starting with puppets on set that were then removed and replaced with the CGI animals we fell in love with on screen.



In an exclusive to Metro.co.uk, Framestore have revealed the amazing differences of the puppets that were used to film each shot, compared to the final result of the lifelike creatures walking around each scene.


Overall, it would take the team around six to eight months to make each daemon, like the pine marten that Lyra’s daemon Pan temporarily takes the form of.

The final piece is a confessed labour of love for the team, who created more than 1,500 creature shots over season one alone, Framestore and production company Bad Wolf have spent years of production time narrowing down what animals were needed, and getting each daemon down to perfection.

Working against the actors and the creatures can be a problem of its own, with Russell Dodgson, VFX supervisor on the show, explaining that it could mean the difference between the show working, and falling apart.

‘One of the biggest challenges you face doing a show like this is you put Ruth Wilson on stage or Dafne Keen or James McAvoy and they deliver a really powerful, emotive performance…then sticking a monkey in it!’

‘One of the biggest challenges you face doing a show like this is you put Ruth Wilson on stage or Dafne Keen or James McAvoy and they deliver a really powerful, emotive performance…then sticking a monkey in it!,’ he told us.

‘At its most basic it could go very wrong very quickly. Where suddenly everyone’s looking at a monkey and not the performance.’

Here are just some of the key moments that Framestore helped create, how they achieved each creation, and how the actors themselves became involved in bringing them to life…

How the magic works…

‘This show is unique because we’re creating creatures that are part of primary characters and involved in narrative conversations, and reinforce narratives,’ he told us. ‘So what it means is they have a continual presence and a continual importance. So the actors had to have something to build a relationship with and work with.

‘So master puppeteer, Todd William-Jones, and he created a small team, and once we cast our animals and decided what they were going to be, we made fairly rudimentary puppets of them, so they were just to scale, and it would be traditionally puppeteered.’

Sculpting rudimentary wooden figures comprised of detailed heads and bodies, the collective were able to help actors by giving the something to react to, and also give the film makers a hand in knowing where the creatures would be in the shot, and their importance to it.

Puppeteers would give actors something to interact with, before it was taken away (Picture: BBC/Framestore/HBO)

‘At the beginning of shooting on a day, we’d block a scene with the puppets, and we’d figure out where the actors would be and where the puppets would be,’ the supervisor explained. ‘Then we’d shoot a first-pass, which we called a puppet pass, as a reference showing where the puppets are meant to be, and giving the actors immediate memory about where their daemons are and some kind of way of accessing their emotions that they’ve got to portray to their daemons.’



‘Then as we’d progress, we’d take the puppets away and replace them with eyelines, so that we then had a clean version of them so in the end we don’t use any of the puppets at all.

‘When it goes to the visual effects process, it all stays in the edit and we had to start everything again.’

Puppets were used to build the scene before being taken away for the main shot (Picture: BBC/HBO/Framestore)

Lyra and Pantalaimon

As the leading lady and hero of the show, it was especially important that Lyra and her relationship with her daemon Pantalaimon was one that viewers could get behind – but comes with the difficulty of Pan’s constantly changing form.

In the lore of the story, daemons only settle on an animal once humans are older, meaning at 11 years old Pan’s look changes dozens of times. In the first episode along, you see him as a nosey pine marten and a bird as just examples.

As a result, the team had a task of finding the best way to represent the character, without it being too confusing for those watching to keep track of.

‘What’s hard about it is that the daemons don’t just represent, like “Pan is my cautious side”, they’re not as binary or basic as that,’ Russell said.

‘They reflect your inner emotion, and a part of your humanity that you don’t shot normally. So if Lyra is acting brave, Pan might be scared, betraying what Lyra’s actually feeling. They offer light and shade to a character.’

Pan’s continuous transformations was stripped back from the books to make it easier for viewers to bond with him (Picture: BBC)

‘In the book, we worked out that Pan becomes about 35 different things, just himself, and they had the intention of doing that, but early on we said that they needed to reduce that number to about eight.


‘We have to fall in love with Pan as a viewer and it’s different how you read him, to how you see him. You need more screen time with less types of animal, so you can build a bond with him and become familiar with how he is in certain situations, or you lose a lot of the language you get from watching performances.’

‘We stripped Pan back and ended up focusing on a specific batch that offered us a nice range of movement and emotion, then started to assign different creatures for different moments, actions or emotions with Lyra.’

Ruth Wilson adopted monkey-like quirks in order to be more like Coulter’s daemon (Picture: BBC/HBO/Framestore)

Mrs Coulter and Golden Monkey

‘The Golden Monkey was really hard,’ Russell explained. ‘He was tricky, and that actually goes back to getting portions of the actors into the creatures. With him we did the opposite.

‘Ruth Wilson took monkey attributes and put them into Mrs Coulter. When you watch the show, there’s moments where you’re holding someone she’s attacking, she’ll pick at their hair a bit, and she’ll have these monkey-ish qualities occasionally that she would draw on.

‘That’s one thing I would say about the puppeteering process. Ruth mentions one puppeteer a lot, Brian Fisher, who she built a very strong bond with.’

Ruth worked closely with the puppeteer to bring in elements of monkey (Picture: HBO/BBC/Framestore)

‘Ruth is amazing,’ he continued. ‘she really gets the daemons and sees that being the root to her character. We did a lot of workshopping with Ruth, she’d work with Brian about physicality and how Coulter and Monkey would attack and work a room as they worked in.


‘She came into Framestore and we interviewed her to try and work out all of the backstory of her and her monkey.’

‘I think the Golden Monkey on average is my favourite daemon/human relationship,’ he added.

Each scene featured puppeteers who would later be replaced with the CGI creatures (Picture: BBC/HBO/Framestore)

Lord Asriel and Stelmaria The Snow Leopard

‘Asriel as a character is resolute, he doesn’t really question himself, and he’s forward momentum all the time,’ Russell explained. ‘He’s very status, and a gigantic ego and the snow leopard is just another version of him, whereas with Pan you get more light and shade.

‘In book one he is just so prominent and “here I am” so Stelmaria is just like a mirror of him, and that’s great fun because you get to make her really statuesque and proud, dominant and aggressive, it’s a really simple relationship that one, but it’s really nice.’

‘Just by doing that it shows more contrast to other people’s characters,’ he added.

His Dark Materials continues Sunday at 8pm on BBC One.

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