Harry Potter's secret sorcerers

1.912226-4101601587 — Creature effects team assembles Aragog at Warner Brothers Studios in Watford, southern England Image Credit: Reuters

Watford, England: The magical world of Harry Potter is being meticulously reassembled at a former aerodrome near London.

The collection of sheds and sound stages is where the eight films were shot over the course of a decade, and soon they will be home to the official ‘Making of Harry Potter' studio tour.

With more than five months to go until the tour's March 31 opening — advance tickets went on sale recently — stonemasons in hard hats are busy laying the flagstone floor of the Great Hall at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Even half-finished, its Gothic arches, gargoyles and huge fireplace are an impressive sight. When it's completed, studio Warner Bros hopes it will be, well, magic.

Movies are all about illusion, but creators of this tour are keen to stress its authenticity. The 14,000-square-metre site will include only authentic sets, props and costumes, on the original studio site 30 kilometres north-west of London.

For the movies' cast, who spent a decade working here — the younger ones growing up on set — it can still evoke powerful feelings of nostalgia.

"I get shudders down my spine every time I walk back in there," said Tom Felton, the 24-year-old actor who played Harry's Muggle-hating Hogwarts rival, Draco Malfoy. "Immediately, as soon as you go back it just fires up a decade's worth of memories.

"I remember the first time I went in there — it was on camera. [Director] Chris Columbus specifically didn't want us to see it before filming, because we were only 11-year-old kids. So, our reaction when we walked in there was pretty much genuine."

Delight to fans

The vast Great Hall, where hundreds of Hogwarts pupils dined, celebrated, and were divided into houses by the mysterious Sorting Hat, will be the centrepiece of the tour, but there will be plenty more to delight Potter fans.

Re-erected sets will include the cupboard under the stairs where Harry was forced to sleep by his miserly relatives, the Dursleys, the imposing Ministry of Magic, headmaster Albus Dumbledore's book-lined office, and Hogwarts' classrooms, common room and a dormitory,

The tour is spread across two soundstages — stages J and K, a pleasing but accidental tribute to Harry's creator, JK Rowling. The existing stages here at Leavesden Studios are A to I.

As well as the sets, visitors will learn how the series' magical creatures were created in the studios' workshops, and see some of the 200 shipping containers full of props that producers have kept from the films.

The eight Potter films made here between 2000 and 2010 were a mini-industry in themselves, employing both the cream of Britain's acting talent and hundreds of craftspeople and technicians. Part of the tour's aim is to show off the behind-the-scenes skill that went into creating the spectacle.

The level of detail is impressive. Dumbledore's bookshelves are lined with individually titled books. The Weasley family kitchen will include a self-washing frying pan, and other ingenious supernatural gadgets."

It will also be a working movie studio. The facility — for years a ramshackle collection of aging buildings and temporary structures on the site of a former aircraft factory — is being turned into Warner Bros' British base.

The company says it will be the biggest studio complex in Europe when it opens next year.