娱乐英语新闻:On a magic tour with Harry Potter

LONDON, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Harry Potter's fans in Britain could go to Hogwarts with the bespectacled boy and start a magic trip from the upcoming Saturday.

The Warner Bros. Studio, which started to build over a decade ago with the launch of the first of Harry Potter series, covers an area over 150,000 square feet in the northwest outskirts of London.

"It was such a magical place to grow up," said Daniel Radcliffe who acts Harry Potter in the movies. "People will be amazed to see the incredible sets that we've worked in all these years."

Rupert Grint, who played Potter's best friend Ron Weasley, said, "The sets all have tiny little details that you may not always notice in the films but when you actually walk through them, you can see all the work that's gone into it."

Visitors into the studio would first set foot on the iconic Great Hall of Hogwarts, whose prototype was the dining hall of famous Christ Church College in Oxford. It was here that Potter and his friends were assigned to different schools by the sorting hat in the film.

On both sides of the hall were displays of uniforms from the four schools. The smallest red and yellow ones for Gryffindor were worn by the young Radcliffe in the first movie, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, while dummies of the teachers, including Professor Albus Dumbledore, stand at the front of the hall.

Visitors could not only drop into the dormitory of Potter, the hut of half-giant Rubeus Hagrid, and the offices of Dumbledore and the pink vicious lady Dolores Umbridge, but also mount the purple three-deck magic bus, or search for the magic wands and owls in shops of the dim Diagon Alley.

Along the journey, staff workers were ready to tell visitors secrets inside the studio, among whom some once took part in production of the movie series.

Danny Oliver had played in the last two movies. "I played several different roles," he recalled. "For example, when Harry Potter went back to his parents' abandoned house, I was a Muggle walking and dancing on the road."

Oliver described going back to work in the studio "coming back home." "Everything is so familiar, even the smell in the air," he said poetically.

He told Xinhua reporter that each and every detail there was handled with delicacy. "Look at the potion bottles in Severus Snape's classroom. The more than 1,000 bottles all carried hand-written labels to make the scene more real."

The tour would also reveal the secrets of special effect behind the movies' magical scenes.

Those who watched the movies could surely remember the moving portraits on the walls of Hogwarts, but few know that the portraits were drawn after crew members of the production team. After a portrait was finished, the painter would draw another picture with only the background, Emma Norton, visual effect producer told visitors through a big screen.

During production of the film, the crew members, dressed up as in the portraits, performed against the backdrop of a green screen, before staff workers in charge of special effects added the background to make them as if moving in a portrait.

Many people can fly in the movies on a broom or in a motorcycle, with a most unforgettable scene being Harry Potter hunting the Golden Snitch in the Quidditch matches. During production, a broom was placed on a motion base. The actors rode on the broom to "fly" against a green screen, before a background of castle was finally added.

One may also marvel at the self-knitting needles and chopping board. In fact, a machine attached to the needles was hidden behind the half-finished scarf in the movie, while a wire was wound under the table of the chopping board, a staff explained.

Visitors may also use the distant controller to "create the magic" themselves, he added.

The last scene in the tour was a model of the Hogwarts. A staff only known as Gracia told Xinhua that the model, as tall as a two or three storey building, was used to create a panorama of the college. "The moss and soil are natural, so as to make it more real," she said.

Creation of the model took seven months, but this is not the most tiring task. "Do you still remember the scene of Christmas snow? It was made by sifting salt," she disclosed. "The cleaning work was a nightmare. A lot of people spent two weeks to remove the salt."

Production of the Harry Potter series started in 2000 and it took ten years to finish all the eight movies. The blockbusters proved a huge commercial success, and became a shared memory of a generation all over the world.

"For over 10 years, the Harry Potter film series highlighted the exceptional creativity and craftsmanship that we have in the British film industry," said Josh Berger, President and Managing Director of the Warner Bros. UK.

"We are delighted that we can now open the doors to this world to the public," he said, "and celebrate the extraordinary talent that goes into making major movies here in the UK."