Behind the Scenes With 'Harry Potter'

Editor's note: Before she was Norcross Patch editor, Laura Sullivan went to the set on assignment for Parenting magazine. Here is her first-person account.

I sat in Dumbledore’s chair (uncomfortable). I flipped through Muggle Law & Order on his bookshelf (actually a phone book). I even picked up a coin at the Gringott’s Bank (surprisingly light).

There, now that we have that out of the way and I can expect death threats from die-hard Potter fans: On the eve of the final—yes, final!—chapter of the most successful film franchise ever made, I’d like to relay my adventures on set at the filming of both parts of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." Thursday's Part 2 release is sure to be the action-packed finale that fans are desperately hoping for, from what I saw.

As the group of reporters made their way through the misty, rolling countryside outside London, we came upon the massive Potter complex. It was an airplane hangar during the war and included a massive field with entire city blocks of stacked furniture and set pieces, numbered and labeled in map-cap heaps.

Nothing Potter had been thrown away for the duration of the filming because the movies were being written as they went: They were never sure what set they might need to rebuild, one of the guides told us, and they wouldn’t want to risk a less-than-perfect recreation of something in the wizarding world.

The complex is a city unto itself, with a fire department, a hospital and mill. It employs about 800 people, according the Nikki Judd, the Warner Bros. representative who hosted us.

Walking through the set pieces—there are usually about 25 up at a time—can be dissociating for Potter fans. The Ministry of Magic backs up to a corridor in Hogwarts, which runs into Dumbledore’s office. Trying to create a seamless, realistic flow of the space was one of the challenges for Electronic Arts, which made all of the video games to accompany the films.

“The filmmakers just don’t need that so we don’t know what comes next when you open a door or get to the end of a corridor,” said Jonathan Bunny, Producer of the EA game series, in an interview after the tour.

The Great Hall piece seemed to be the only permanent structure—and it was as gothic and breathtaking as it is in the films. The heavy hand-made doors are massive and actually gold leafed. The floors are made of real stone from York because the designers knew that other sets would be built inside the massive Hall like Russian dolls, requiring the floors to bear a lot of weight.

Dumbledore’s office is the claustrophobic, bookish space you’d expect it to be. The portraits on the walls are all hand-painted, except for three bright green canvases in old frames. Actors would later be edited in on green scene, explained on the guide, to create the effect of a "live" animated painting that you see in the films.

Painstaking work was done on the smallest of set pieces. Longhaired artists in jeans hand-painted the bricks in the Ministry of Magic as we passed through.

In a room set up as a camp for wizardry students in a dank basement at Hogwarts, the sleeping bags were emblazoned with the Hogwarts crest; Old magazines and books were printed with realistic headlines the pertained to the plot, like “Muggle Murders on the Rise.”

The conversations that happen among the producers and set builders can sometimes be hysterical because of the level of detail, said producer David Haymen.

“You are approaching everything as a reality, because it’s got to be real to an audience. So you have these conversations about the motivation of a Grindylow or what is a dragon thinking,” Heyman said, mentioning he was on the way to a meeting about giants that day. “You’re having these conversations that anyone outside of these walls out think you are completely bonkers,” he laughed.

But part of the challenge and excitement of the last films is that the action takes place outside of Hogwarts. This also creates an opportunity for the filmmakers.

“We’re excited about this story because it's Harry out in the wild—it’s Harry out of Hogwarts and he doesn’t have to obey the rules of being in school,” said Haymen. “And with Deathly Hallows, it’s jam pack with action—it's scene after scene after scene.”

(For "Harry Potter" theaters and showtimes near Suwanee, check http://www.moviefone.com/)