Voldemort almost died in *this* unexpected way in “Harry Potter”

Fans of Harry Potter probably vividly remember Voldemort’s death at the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, but it turns out that wasn’t the original idea. We just found out that Voldemort almost died in a different and kinda strange way.

In an interview with Huffington Post, Moving Picture Company VFX supervisor Greg Butler — one of the visual effects supervisors who worked on the Harry Potter films — revealed some of what went into the iconic scene where Voldemort dies at the end of the last movie after Harry defeats him.

And it appears the team was very thoughtful when considering what should happen and how it should look.

“I remember the moment of the weeks [after] trying to nail down what would really happen because we knew it was important," Butler said. "It was important to us, but we knew it was going to be even more important to people who read the books."

It all started with Nagini’s death, which ensured that Voldemort couldn’t return. They put the faces of young Tom Riddle and Ralph Fiennes into the smoke, hoping “you’d get the feeling that there are lots of dead Voldemort souls in there or something.”

Then they moved on to Voldemort’s actual death, and there was the idea of him turning into — and this is where things depart from the end result — a blackened tree.

That’s right, a tree. And then, his ashes would float away in the wind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9Fzm2IxwMs?feature=oembed

That sounds pretty strange, but we bet they would’ve made it work. They got pretty far in the process of the tree idea before it started to morph:

“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."

This evolved into the skin peeling off effect, which is what ended up being his final moment in the film. Considering the importance of that moment, it’s neat to hear more about the process that went into creating it!