PoA Widescreen DVD

[Sally Grist]

--- In HPFGU-Movie at yahoogroups.com, GulPlum <hp at p...> wrote:
> In the meantime, take a look at http://plum.cream.org/HP/poa.htm 
(there are 
> currently 39 pictures on the page so it may take a while to load).
> Even if nobody can help out with screen captures, comments on what 
I wrote 
> are welcome, as always. :-)
> 
> --
> GulPlum AKA Richard, with lots of catching up to do all over the 
place

Hi GulPlum AKA Richard,

I'm a complete film/technical ignoramus and I visited your site
and 
found it a fascinating eye-opener into the difference between wide 
and full-screen shots. Thanks for taking the time to put together 
such an interesting and enlightening piece of info. I never realised 
how much of the top and bottom screen you lose just to get the wide-
screen version. I agree that widescreen is probably superior to full-
screen as it does show more screen area, but does it have to be at 
such expense to the top and bottom? 

I've always found widescreen to be somewhat bizarrely
proportioned, 
I mean who decided that we all want to go to the cinema and watch a 
film as though we were peering at it through a letterbox anyway? Why 
can't `full-screen' be just that - the wide-screen width,
plus the 
extra top and bottom of the full-screen? I mean if all four extreme 
edges have been captured on film, and all four are being used for 
either full or wide-screen, why doesn't someone invent a screen
that 
shows them all at the same time? It's not that strange a concept
is 
it? I'm probably being very naïve here, it's only that I
just spent 
half an hour drooling over the prospect of seeing a bit more of 
those wonderful sets and props, and I almost feel cheated now to see 
what I've been missing! 

My attention was particularly drawn to the close-up of the picture 
of the Evening Prophet from COS at http://plum.cream.org/HP/cos.htm. 
My husband recently bought me what was supposed to be a photocopy of 
that original prop, but when we compared it to the one in the film, 
we could see it was clearly a fake. The full-screen shot on your 
site is the absolute proof of this. I can now see that what appears 
to be a rounded column of text at the foot of the page is actually 
heart-shaped, a detail that the forger was not smart enough to spot 
as he obviously based his forgery on the restricted view of the wide-
screen version and just interpreted the rest himself. Needless to 
say, my husband will be leaving some very colourful feedback under 
his Ebay profile, and demanding a refund under the trade 
descriptions act.

Anyway, if nothing else, it's given me the inspiration to create 
some replicas of my own. Not to sell on Ebay or anything, just 
because I love making my own Harry Potter things as I'm a
designer 
and it's a hobby of mine. Only thing is, your link to the 
enlargement of the newspaper image is broken and there's only so 
much I can make out from the smaller one. Do you still have the 
enlarged image, or do you know where I can find it? Or 
alternatively, do you have any good stills of other Daily Prophet 
shots that I could use to base my creations on?

Many thanks, 

Sally Grist
Minister of Flash Magic