A magical DAY OUT
SHARON STEPHENSON GOES THE WHOLE HOGWARTS AT A NEW LONDON ATTRACTION
How do you keep the magic alive when one of the world’s most successful movie franchises has ended? You open a studio tour, that’s how.
It’s a strategy that’s certainly worked for the makers of the
Harry Potter movies, if the queues snaking around the corner of the former WWII aerodrome and airplane factory 40-minutes north of London are anything to go by.
Confession time: I’m not a big Harry Potter fan. I’ve never read any of the books and I’ve only seen the first film. Clearly, though, I’m the exception because the eight films grossed around $11 billion, making the movies about a boy wizard the second-highest earning series after the Marvel Comics franchise.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not as excited as the kids (and their parents) who’ve dressed as Muggles and wizards to visit the 80-hectare complex where the films were in production for more than a decade.
The tour, which is mostly selfguided, is as much about how the movies are made as what’s in them. Which means you get a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how those clever special effects people weave animatronics, science and detailed craftsmanship into every frame.
After a video showing the film’s stars Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson talking about spending their childhood in this studio, we enter Hogwarts’ Great Hall, complete with long dining tables. This was one of the first sets to be built and has been used in all the films, seating 400 children at a time split into the four school houses: Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Slytherin and Hufflepuff.
The OMG moments keep coming: Dumbledore’s office, with its cabinet of memories, Harry’s invisibility cloak and the Potions classroom where
1000 glass bottles, each containing something different, were sourced from more than 200 locations.
Videos and captions demystify the film-making tricks: how Hagrid was made to look so big, how candles float above the tables and how broomsticks were made to fly.
In Diagon Alley, I visit Ollivander’s Wand Shop where Harry chose his wand (or did it choose him?). It took six months of painstaking effort to build the street that looks as though it’s been there for centuries. In fact, it was this level of detail I found the most fascinating.
My husband works in the film industry, which means I’m aware of the huge amount of work that goes into a movie, but in the special effects room I was blown away when I saw that each werewolf prosthetic was made with real goat hair inserted strand by strand. And that Aragog, the giant spider, was covered by hand with yak hair, sisal and hemp. Some of the biggest gasps, though, are saved for the Hogwarts Express train. Visitors can board this working steam engine and take a million photos.
I also blistered my camera finger at the breathtaking Hogwarts castle model, which took 86 artists months to hand-sculpture to scale.
I brave the cold to wander around the studio back-lot, the home of everything from Hogwarts Bridge to Harry’s famous flying Ford Anglia car.
I hadn’t heard great things about the butterbeer (a frothing butterscotch concoction), so I bypassed the café in favour of the gift store where money magically flew out of my wallet!
It’s not easy distilling 11 years of film-making into a tour, and even harder to please the most die-hard “Potterhead”, but Warner Bros has cast a spell and managed to pull it off.