Greg Butler strikes a quidditch pose for a 2006 Chistmas card. (Provided / Greg Butler) Central Vermont enjoys an exciting link to this year’s Academy Awards through Greg Butler, the son of Ed Butler of Hunt Road in Randolph. The younger Butler is part of a team nominated for “Best Visual Effects” Oscar for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part Two.” The 2012 Oscars are scheduled for Sunday, Feb. 26.

Contacted Tuesday at home in Vancouver, B.C., Butler, was still jet-lagged from England where he received Britain’s equivalent of the Oscar, the BAFTA, for best visual effects just two nights earlier. Flying high, Butler hopes the BAFTA is a bellwether of Oscar gold.

Area movie-goers have delighted in the Harry Potter series. The Herald’s page one feature photograph one week showed a long line of hyper-enthusiastic children and adults, eager to see J. K. Rowling’s characters on the big screen.

. Death Eaters attack and burn down the Hog­warts quidditch pitch in “Deathly Hallows 2”. Over half of the movie footage depends upon digitally produced visual effects. For an entire decade, through eight movies of the saga, young view­ers have watched a then 11 year-old Daniel Radcliffe, as Harry, and his friends grow and mature, finally vanquishing the Dark Lord Volde­mort in this past fall’s “Deathly Hallows: Part Two.” As audiences grew, the Harry Potter movies did too, new developments in cinema­tography and maturing of the story’s themes advancing the films’ critical acclaim.

Though audience favorites from the beginning, Harry Potter films have yet to break the Oscar code. The first seven Potter movies re­ceived nine Oscar nominations, all in technical categories, but never won. This surprises many, given that it’s one of the three highest grossing film franchises of all time, with the James Bond, and Star Wars sagas.

. Left to right: Ed Butler with sons Jared and Greg at the Randolph train station in 2006. “Deathly Hallows: Part Two,” is nominated for three 2012 Os­cars: art direction (Stuart Craig for pro­duction design and Steph­anie Mc­Millan for set décor­ation), makeup (Nick Dudman, Amanda Knight, and Lisa Tom­blin) and visual ef­fects (Tim Burke, David Vickery,

Greg But­ler, and John Richardson)

Industry speculation favors Pot­ter this year. Not only is it the top- grossing movie of the year (making it hard for the Academy to ignore), but this is also the last chance for the Academy to recognize the mer­its of an entire decade of beloved

Harry Potter films.

Butler Began Early

Greg Butler grew up in the 1970’s and 80’s and credits many films as early influences: Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings, the Star Wars trilogy, Superman, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Close En­counters of the Third Kind, E.T., The Dark Crystal, to name a few.

Interviewed earlier, Butler ob­serves, “Most of these films would now be called ‘special effects driv­en’ films, but to me they were just amazing stories that completely drew me in. Of course, I wanted to find out anything I could about how the effects were created. In those days, there was not a lot of infor­mation available about how these films were made.”

Luckily, growing up in the small town of Suffield, Conn., on the Mas­sachusetts border, Butler was able to frequent a local theater that of­ten ran reruns for just 99 cents. He remembers recreating Star Wars scenes in the second grade, and soon thereafter formed a neighbor­hood movie production company with his brother, Jared, and two girls “down the street.” Under the banner, “Blossom Street Produc­tions,” they started making short

Super 8 versions of James Bond, The Dukes of Hazard, and un­titled monster and space movies.

Butler’s enthusiasm was car­ried unabated to Hampshire Col­lege, just up the road in western Massa­chusetts. As a freshman, however, he was completely shut out of the photography, film, and video pro­duction classes. He did get a work study job in the en­gineering depart­ment, where he soon found that his “combination of curiosity, technical aptitude and a set of keys to all of the video production facilities was getting me all sorts of new connec­tions and acquaintances in the film and video depart­ments.” Before long, Butler was help­ing older students and some profes­sors with their projects. Then, in his third year, a friend asked him to serve as director of photog­raphy on her final video project. That con­tact really launched Butler’s career, for upon graduation, she went to work for Industrial Light and Magic, the groundbreaking vis­ual effects company founded by George Lucas. Butler followed, and by 1992, was working as a camera engineering intern with ILM.

“In the end, my course of stud­ies at Hampshire was far less im­portant than the contacts I made. Networking is really the key. To this day, my biggest motivation still comes from the amazing people I’m with at work, the problems and challenges we face together.”

Changes Come Quickly

“In 1992, ILM had just com­pleted Hook and Death Becomes Her,” he noted. Both films’ ef­fects used some digital com­positing, but were mostly created with traditional techniques such as hand-inked ro­toscoping and optical printing. At the same time, the small computer graph­ics department was doing tests of digital dinosaurs for Juras­sic Park.”

Butler returned a year later to start his first job and found the company had almost completed its transition.

“The optical printers were being dismantled and a number of de­partments had disappeared or been computerized. Computer graphics in visual effects had graduated from one-off “gim­micks” like the water creature in The Abyss to become an integral part of the filmmaking process.”

In 1996, Butler moved on to work at Tippett Studio in Berkeley. Work­ing with Phil Tippett, a leg­endary stop-motion animator and effects director, was a “hugely formative exper­ience.” “I really came to learn under Phil that computer graphics are just a new way of working in a much old­er craft. Greek dramas employed methods 2,500 years ago that are still relevant today. Remember your audience. Don’t sweat the details if a scene is working. Is the shot epic enough? Scary enough? Grand enough?

“If the effects are working, great, but if the scene is failing, no amount technical wizardry will save it. Careful preparation, good direction, clear communi­cation and timing are still key. I’ve never forgotten the lessons I learned early on, even though the work I do now has a higher level of technical com­plexity than 15 years ago.”

In 1999, Butler moved to New Zealand to begin work with Pe­ter Jackson on a new epic trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. Six years, 30 Academy nominations, and 17 Os­cars later, that project was complet­ed. During this period, Butler made a memorable local appearance, pre­senting a talk about his role in the creation of the character Gollum for a standing room crowd of teens at Randolph’s Bethany Church.

Harry Potter

On Oscar night, Greg Butler will join Richardson, Burke, and Vickery at the Kodak Theater for the Academy Awards. The Oscar, if they win, won’t be divided. Each will re­ceive the award for their visual ef­fects contributions to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part Two.

There are about 1800 visual ef­fects shots in this two-hour movie, the shortest of the Potter series. Each of these averages 120 frames, or five seconds on the screen. More than half the movie, then, benefits from the digital effects work of these four men and their extensive staffs.

A small city of workers from two corporations, MPC and Double Negative provided over 1,000 com­puter graphics people for the movie. Butler, working with MPC, super­vised the work of over two hundred at various stages. The visual effects team was headed by Burke, who previous won an Oscar for Gladiator.

Greg’s wife Lisa will join him at the Oscars, just as she did for the BAFTAs in London. Stephen, who turned one on Valentine’s Day, will again stay home.

“We will be getting there hours early, walking the red carpet long before the folks on television cov­erage.”

Here in Randolph, there will be many hoping to see Greg and his colleagues, however, as they re­ceive the grand award that has so far eluded the Harry Potter fran­chise. Greg’s dad, Ed, with his wife Cindy will travel south that day to join Greg’s mom, Ellie Binns, and her husband Richard, and a huge throng of family and friends for a grand and very hopeful party.

The Next Visit

Before signing off from his cell phone interview on Tuesday, But­ler mentioned that he would be in Randolph visiting Ed and Cindy this summer. While here, he has offered to reprise the com­munity talk he gave while working on the Lord of the Rings.

This visit is already much antici­pated. Chandler has al­ready started arranging a red carpet welcome. And, yes, Greg promises to bring the hardware; a BAFTA and, we all hope, something more.