[HPFGU-Movie] Filming PoA

[GulPlum]

At 11:12 16/02/03 , TACtalk at adelanta.co.uk wrote:
>Could someone please clarify? I thought that the kids were taking a year to
>concentrate on schoolwork, and that they would start their parts in PoA in
>the summer holiday.
>
>Or has Dan been filming the Knight Bus stuff in his half-term?

Not quite. It was said from the beginning (i.e. when CoS was in the can) 
that Dan's parents insisted that he get a complete *term* at his new school 
(i.e. September-Christmas), and that PoA would start filming in "the 
spring". Personally, I'd always taken that to mean that they'd start main 
unit filming during half term (i.e. week starting tomorrow) which was 
confirmed some time ago.

Considering next school year (2003/4) will be Year One of Dan's GCSEs, I 
suspected from the beginning that everyone involved would try to schedule 
filming to have as little impact as possible on that year (and the one 
after, as that'll be the single most important year of his school life), 
and thus (as I speculated a few days ago) they'll try to do as much as 
possible during the summer.

As this school year for Dan doesn't feature major exams at the end of it, I 
always felt that it was far more reasonable to "sacrifice" the third term 
of this year rather than any of next. It seems like his parents, his school 
and everyone else agrees with me, so unlike the previous two movies which 
started during autumn half-term and thus Dan lost 2/3 of normal school 
life, this way he loses a little under half.

The tricky one's going to be GoF, which one way or another will eat into 
Dan's GCSE exam year, a disruption which everyone's going to want to keep 
to a minimum, and perhaps one of the reasons why Columbus thinks Dan might 
not be around.

On a related subject - I feel a bit sorry for Dan and anyone else involved 
in filming the Knight Bus scenes this week - a lot of it is outdoors in the 
heart of summer, but it's bloody *freezing* out there - and it's set to 
continue for most of this week...