Friday, January 8, 2016

Harry Potter Studio Tour

Hi everyone! Just before Christmas we had an excellent time at the Warner Bros. Harry Potter Studio Tour at Leavesden. This was where most of the Harry Potter movies were filmed, and we can't wait to share about it with you! To start, we walked into the large, but not so large area where the dining hall was filmed. It was a lot smaller than we thought, and the movie makers used lots of camera tricks and editing to make the hall seem bigger. We saw a lot of other Hogwarts rooms, and they were actually very spread out. I really liked Hagrid's motorbike, and this is one of the many used in filming.
 As many of you know, we both love cats, so Crookshanks, Hermione's cat, stuck out to us. Did you know that there was not one cat used, but four. The animals are tested and trained a lot before they ever come on set, and these four passed.
 Outside, we saw lots of larger objects and sets, including the Knight bus. We were surprised by how big it was. The Set Designers had to combine 3 London Buses, then paint it purple to make the Knight Bus!
 Next to the Knight Bus, we saw Privet Drive, the street that Harry lives on. The filming set is only made up of 3 houses, not a whole street. Of those 3 houses, only 1 has an interior, the others are just fronts.
After that, we returned inside to the creature design area, where we saw all of the creatures and mythical species in The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. The creature below is Buckbeak, Hagrid's Hippogriff. He is controlled by a remote, which we saw an interesting video about.
Lastly, we saw an incredibly detailed and scaled model of Hogwarts Castle. The model was added on to for the filming of each new movie, as new areas of the castle were explored. Each of the turrets has 1000's of shingles on them, each hand laid.
We'd say that the Harry Potter Studio Tour at Leavesden was EXCELLENT!

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