Harry Potter...again

In the final episode of what has been a pretty extensive Harry Potter experience here in London we went to the WB studio tour just outside of town.  

We had already gone on a tour of sites in London where filming had taken place (somehow the pictures disappeared, must have been magic), experienced the madness first hand with the Premieres here last year, and visited some of the other locations which inspired the movie.  Turns out that for the first film they did alot of the shooting on locations, as it wasn't clear yet just how popular the films were going to be and they didn't want to spend the money to build everything the first time around.  But this ended up being the home for the cast and crew for something like 10 years.

I am sure that I will get ridiculed for saying this, but may have been my favorite thing in all of Europe.  It has been a year and a half of seeing sights and thinking 'wow I wonder what happened here' but this time you knew exactly what happened there.  There is a quote from a movie that says something like, 'do you know why people look sad when they walk out of a movie theatre?  Its because all the magic is gone and they have to go back to reality.' (if anyone knows the movie let me know, because I have been racking my brain for like a week trying to figure it out.)  The entire place was like that for me....a journey out of reality and into a world where literally anything was possible.  I could have spent days just staring at stuff.  

I give all of the creative people and artists tons of credit, to see what they put together up close was just amazing.  Thinking about the movies, you would have guessed that they were like 90% CGI, but seeing how much stuff was actually real just made it even more impressive.  

I ended up taking like 500 pictures, so pretty much have the entire tour documented, but tried to scale it way down to share.  Even still it won't do it justice.  Here is a link to alot of the pics, but still nowhere near all of them.  Some of the most impressive stuff and a quick 2 minute tour is here.......

The cupboard under the stairs

The tour begins with the front doors of Hogwarts

And then the REAL full size great hall

From the Yule Ball

The boys dorm and Harry's bed

The gates to Hogwarts

From the Ministry

No. 4 Privet Drive, on the studio backlot

Diagone Alley

Strangely enough this was the part of the tour that I was most in awe of.  Not sure why.....something about people coming up with these crazy ideas and designs and then, making them absolutely flawless down to the last detail.   Would have loved to have one of these up on my wall.  

The other thing that was stuck out was at the very end of the tour they had a 1/24th scale model of the entirety of Hogwarts.  Supposedly took 8 people 40 days to build.  Was complete down to lights in windows that turned on when the 'sun' went down and movement to make it look like students were walking through the halls.  They used the model for the first 7 movies until the CGI got to a point where they had a good enough digital Hogwarts.