The Wonderful World Of Harry Potter

Hogwarts Bridge

"Are you excited?" the lady serving behind the counter at the Warner Bros Studio Tour café smiled at Rob. "I'm 23." An impatient, sarcastic tone echoed in his curt retort. "Are you here with your parents?" The lady continued, oblivious to his response. "Er. Yes." he glumly replied. Damn. He'd been rumbled. 

None of us would say we were real Harry Potter fans, but some glowing reports from friends who had visited The Making of Harry Potter exhibition had persuaded us to see it. Not that this was our first visit to the studios at Leavesdon, but this time we knew we needed to buy our tickets in advance to get in!

We had invited Rob and Sarah to join us, as Rob, being remarkably sensible and self-sacrificing, had missed out on his company's fabulous Christmas party on the set of Hogwarts Great Hall, just so he wouldn't be too tired or hungover for the annual FBCC event he was hosting the next day.

Unfortunately, Rob hadn't shown the same restraint the night before, and was struggling to show any enthusiasm for the tour. Sarah, on the other hand, was a revelation. It transpired that she'd seen the films several times - friends' choice, not hers, of course - and knew which episode virtually every prop and character was in.

What surprised us most is the huge investment that the production team made in the intricate detail and authentic look of the props, models and sets. Sometimes on screen for only a few seconds and often as just a small part of that scene. For example, 17,000 individually labelled boxes were made for Ollivanders Wand Shop in Diagon Alley, which  only appears for a couple of minutes in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. They also produced 12,000 handmade books, 25,000 printed pages of The Quibbler and 40,000 products for the Weasley's Wizard Wheezes shop. Many of the books were set in Dumbledore's office, along with 48 original portraits of "Hogwarts' headmasters". And if you're wondering where the models came from, they were the producers and crew, now immortalised in the films. 800 tiny, hand-labelled vials filled Dumbledore's memory cabinet and, perhaps best of all, a superb brass celestial telescope was built to sit in a small upper gallery above his desk. It is a scientific work of art but we doubt if anyone can remember seeing it in any of the episodes.


Special effects were more widely used than we imagined. Some were used to transport the cast to the Scottish Highlands rather than move the whole cast and production team there in real life. Of course the flying broomstick scenes were filmed on a green screen with the background added in by the Special Effects team. On the tour you get the chance to ride a broomstick across the skies of London, and you can even buy a video as a souvenir. Predictably, the broomstick queue was incredibly long and the end product less convincing than the films, so we passed on that one. 

Several of the displays give away some of the behind-the-scenes secrets of how the film was made. We won't spoil it by giving too many away, but how they made Hagrid look big was fascinating. We'd guessed they had two versions of his hut; a large one to make Harry and co look small and a normal sized one to fit Robbie Coltrane as Hagrid. But we thought it had just been a clever use of perspective when they were in scenes together. To give Hagrid his height they employed 6'10" former England rugby international, Martin Bayfield, as a body double with platform boots and an incredibly lifelike Hagrid head stuck on top which was mechanically animated and looked astonishingly realistic. 

Several versions of Hagrid's head are on display along with some other animated creations. The Hippogriff was particularly impressive, coming to life in front of us with such a smoothness, subtlety and variety of movement that you had to tell yourself it wasn't real. And we thought it had been CGI'd. There is a lot of that, of course, but they all started as drawings and then models.

Keith particularly enjoyed the gallery of original scene sketches. Apart from the artwork, several TV screens showed a pencil sketch turning into an artist's impression morphing into a short clip of that scene in the actual movie. Fascinated, he could have watched them for hours, but we had one more room to explore. The one containing perhaps the biggest secret, the model of Hogwarts that was used for filming most of the exterior shots. Up until that point, Jan was convinced they'd used an actual castle in Scotland. Over 50 feet in diameter, it took a staggering 74 man years to build. It has over 2,500 fibre optic lights to simulate lanterns, torches and even students passing through hallways. They are shown to full effect as the ambient light changes slowly back and forth from day to night. The spellbinding detail is worth savouring and the longer you look at it, the more things you spot, like owls in the Owlery and even hinges on the tiny doors.

Finally, we hauled ourselves away and after a quick browse around the incredible range of merchandise in the vast gift shop, caught up with Rob and Sarah outside the café. We'd spent over three hours wandering around and enjoyed every minute. And despite appearances, a hungover Rob admitted that he'd enjoyed it as well - and had just about got over the embarrassment of being in Harry Potter World with his parents.