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Harry Potter tour focuses on behind-camera wizardry
Published in The Egyptian Gazette on 30 - 03 - 2012

LONDON - A new tour at the film studios outside London where the Harry Potter blockbusters were shot aims to champion the "unsung heroes" -- from seamstresses to special effects wizards -- who made the movies magical for millions.
"Warner Bros. Studio Tour - The Making of Harry Potter"
opens to the public on Saturday, and organisers expect 5,000
visitors to file past the familiar sets, strange creatures and
scale models every day.
They enter through the famous Great Hall, a cavernous room
with stone-like walls, real stone floors and graffiti-marked
tables where students of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and
Wizardry ate their feasts and enjoyed the Yule Ball.
Also preserved from the original films are Gryffindor Common
Room, Professor Dumbledore's office, the potions classroom,
Hagrid's hut, the Weasleys' kitchen and a section of the
Ministry of Magic.
The giant spider Aragog, a version of the animatronic
"Hippogriff" Buckbeak and eerily life-like models of the actors
allow visitors to study up close the painstaking craftsmanship
that every scene involved.
The animatronic Aragog, for example, needed 100 technicians
to operate, real goat hair was inserted strand by strand to
create Greyback's werewolf face and Ollivanders shop in Diagon
Alley contained 17,000 individually labelled wand boxes.
"There's just so much detail in everything," said Rupert
Grint, who played Harry's best friend Ron Weasley in the films.
"I'm so happy it hasn't all been put away into storage and
collected dust and forgotten about because it's something that
really needs to be celebrated," he told Reuters, sitting in the
Weasley kitchen.
A ONE-OFF PROJECT
The output of hundreds of people working behind the camera
on sets, costumes, masks and props were combined with
computer-generated images in what special effects supervisor
John Richardson called a unique collaboration.
"I've worked on nine of the (James) Bond movies and they
didn't have the same look or aspect or thought process, if you
like, that's gone into the Potters.
"Never before have you had a group of technicians work for
10 years, 12 years in my case, all on the same film without,
virtually, a break."
The tour, which lasts around three hours, finishes with a
walk along Diagon Alley which leads eventually to a large room
filled with a huge scale model of Hogwarts castle.
Its courtyards, towers and turrets were filmed and enhanced
with digital effects and more than 2,500 lights were installed
to simulate lanterns and torches inside.
Early reviews of the attraction at Leavesden Studios just
outside London have been mixed, with some criticism levelled at
the ticket prices and other costs.
Adults pay 28 pounds ($45) and children 21 pounds, and a
pass for a family of four costs 83 pounds. Children under five
go free, and tickets must be booked online in advance. There are
tickets available for most week days over the coming months.
Visitors also have to pay for transport -- a short train ride from London, for example, followed by a special bus service from Watford Junction, and they exit the tour through a gift shop where the most expensive item is a replica of the robes worn by Dumbledore costing 495.95 pounds ($790).
Many of the sets are cordoned off, although interactive
elements include a "magic" iron moving at the wave of a wand,
touch screens helping children navigate Hogwarts and broomsticks
to sit on and "fly" over digitally imposed backgrounds.


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