Umbridge's Office, photo courtesy of Warner Brothers
Our green screen broomstick ride
The last section in this first sound stage is dedicated to the Special Effects department. There are three huge screens running videos of the craftsmen at work showing all their tricks and techniques, from the greenscreen footage and CGI work through to the final shots. Several huge props are on display attached to their motion rigs, including the Gringott’s vault cart and Mad-Eye Moody’s recumbent broomstick. However, the best bit of this section is tucked away in a separate room and allows you to have a go on a broomstick or drive the Ford Anglia yourself. You get to sit on a broomstick (or green box for the Ford Anglia), and the monitors around show you superimposed onto footage of London streets, the river Thames, the Hogwarts Express and the castle itself. You get to whiz around for a couple of minutes before they take a still photo of you and send you through to the tills. I was hoping to be able to take home a DVD of the footage or maybe have it emailed to me, but for some bizarre reason they don’t have the rights to do that! So you have to make do with the photos, which were £18 for the three we brought. As this was a preview day the queues weren’t too bad at all, but I dread to think what it will be like on a busy day.
Butterbeers all round!
We’re about halfway around the tour now and the next part to visit is the backlot – an open air section between the two soundstages where you can grab some much needed refreshments, including the much sought after Butterbeers! They were a bit on the pricey side, £2.95 for a half-pint plastic cup (not even fancy steins like in the Florida theme park), but boy did they taste nice! A kind of butterscotch flavored cream soda, topped with a creamy marshmallow sauce – I could have drunk about five and kept thinking about them all day long. Again though, I think the tiny refreshment stand will be swamped on a busy day, but maybe they’re planning to add some more units later. We got to drink our Butterbeers sitting on the actual benches used in the Great Hall and gaze out over the Knight Bus, another Ford Anglia, Hagrid’s motorbike/sidecar (both of which you can sit in), the Riddle family tombstone and a section of the rickety wooden Hogwarts bridge. Over the other side was the Potter’s burnt out cottage from Godric’s Hollow and number 4 Privet Drive. For the first movie they used a real street in the town that I grew up in, Bracknell, but for later films they recreated the street on the backlot.
Nearly Headless Nick's Head
Passing by some of the giant chess pieces from the first movie, we enter the second sound stage and I was slightly freaked out by the first thing I saw: John Cleese’s head on a spike! Of course, it was really Nearly Headless Nick’s head sitting up there next to a whole row of goblins and other strange creatures. A series of video screens here show what it was like to work in the creature shop, introduced by Warwick Davies who cleverly leads you from one screen to the next, past models of Fawkes, a snapping Monster Book of Monsters and a giant animatronic head of Hagrid. In the next room is the life size (i.e., ENORMOUS!) model of Aragog the spider and one of three animatronic Buckbeak models. For most of the time he sits there motionless, but occasionally he gently springs to life and looks at you, seeming like he wants to have a little chat.
Diagon Alley, photo courtesy of Warner Brothers
Flourish & Blotts
Walking around the corner transports you into another world entirely. The dark lighting and cobbled street can only mean one thing – you have entered Diagon Alley. All of the shops have been rebuilt using the original sets – Flourish & Blotts, Eeylops Owl Emporium, Potage’s Cauldron Shop and of course Ollivander’s Wand Shop are there and every one of them is crammed full of detail. At the top end of the street stands Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes, its bright orange shopfront standing out from the crowd of blackness, and featuring the moving model of one of the red-haired twins doffing his hat, bursting out of the windows. The major downside to how great all of the shops look is the fact that you can’t go inside them, pick up their wares, hand over your money and walk out again – you have to wait until you get to the gift shop for that!
Hogsmead model
At the end of Diagon Alley we move into another completely contrasting world – the art and design department. No more dark and dingy walls at all sort of strange angles, all covered in dust and cobwebs. No, here everything is pristine and white. The clean walls are covered with precision architectural drawings, where even the handwriting is a work of art. Here we see incredibly detailed plans, accurate down to the millimeter, for many of the props and sets we’ve already seen on rest of the tour, including the cute House Elf armor and Gringott’s vault cart. A grey draftsman’s table serves as a projection screen for another video, introduced by Emma Watson, praising the hard work of the art department, with sections especially designed to be shown on certain areas of the table – like photos being shown on a picture frame. Further around the slowly rising path are walls full of concept paintings and artwork. There are also intricate cardboard models of Hogsmead and the Hogwarts Castle – which has every brick marked out on it. I’d heard about the famous Hogwarts and was very impressed with all the work that had been put into it.
