MOVIE MAGIC

Okay, this is my last Harry Potter post, but I just wanted to share some of the really cool special effects stuff you can see on the tour. Its amazing, all the different ways they have to create all these unbelievable scenes. Animatronics, green screens, models... Its interesting, in the 'Reading Film' class I took during my last year of my undergrad I was surprised to learn how many things that I thought were CGI were actually done with camera tricks. However, I am beginning to suspect that my lecturer may have overstated the extent to which such features are still used, as both this exhibit and extra features from recent films show a heavy reliance on CGI (as well as animatronics and models).

One movie special effects area that I have a lot of interest in is makeup and prosthetics. I'm a big fan of SyFy's reality show Face Off in which a group of prosthetic makeup artists compete against each other to create prostheses such as those found in science fiction and horror films. It is seriously amazing how much makeup artists can transform actors (my friend Annie is going to school in Toronto for this right now, and it is super cool).

Green screen and CGI are obviously very big components of films like Harry Potter, with stuff like quidditch being built in computers. They had a room where you could go in front of a green screen on a broom, and fly over London on a computer screen, which was quite fun (unfortunately, you had to pay to actually keep the images, which I did not. My hairstyle does not work on green screen).

Now this is a trick of perception.

So many goblin heads.

LUNA'S LION. It was awesome, there were all the obvious parts of the exhibits, but if you looked around, there was also a lot of stuff just tucked in all over the place (the Lion hat is on a shelf really close to the ceiling).

CREEPY.

This was one of my favourite rooms in the exhibit - the amount of work that goes into designing every little detail is staggering.

The concept art was also amazing (and in some cases, much better than the final effect).

There were also quite a few animatronics throw in throughout the exhibit, which was fun.

And thats all for Harry Potter! It really was an amazing experience, and one I would heartily recommend to any fan of the series. The gift shop at the end is incredibly expensive, but I did buy a wand (Hermione's) and a sugar quill (I try not to buy souvenirs unless they are at least somewhat practical, ie. mugs, magnets, coasters... but I figure I will love and cherish that wand because I am a huge, huge geek, and so it was totally worth it to buy something slightly impractical but ultimately, amazing).