PoA DVD

[GulPlum]

Hi folks,

I know the DVD has already been out for five months and everyone's moved on 
to thinking about GoF (and beyond), but I've only just managed to complete 
the job I had set myself for the HP movies, to do comparisons of the 
fullscreen and widescreen releases. I know my previous comparisons for 
PS/SS and CoS were popular, so I expect the same will be true of this one:

http://plum.cream.org/HP/poa.htm

While I'm at it, and this is even older material, I recently came across an 
interview with Paul Kieve (magic consultant on PoA) in the December issue 
of the Birmingham (UK) "What's On" magazine. The reason for the interview 
was the opening of Dahl's play "The Witches", for which he did various 
special effects  (people changing into mice, etc). The reason I bring this 
up is because they also touched on PoA and as far as I'm aware, there's 
never been any clarification of what his role was in the movie, so this 
might be interesting.

This is the relevant extract from the interview:

Q. You worked on the last Harry Potter film - tell us about that.

A. They had never had a real magician work on the films before - that was 
the initiative of the director of the third movie-Alfonso Cuaron.

I was involved with a total of six scenes.

One scene - where all the kids were doing tricks from Zonko's Joke Shop in 
the Great Hall - was cut from the movie but has made it as a deleted scene 
on the DVD.

I make a cameo appearance in the Three Broomsticks pub and I am honoured to 
be the first magician to perform magic live in any of the films! 
Essentially I added mainly background activity to a number of scenes (clue: 
look behind Ian Brown!!). I also designed, constructed and operated the 
last full-screen effect shot in the movie - the Marauder's Map folding 
itself up, and created floating spheres in the astronomy room.

One of the highlights for me of working on the movie was working with the 
production designer Stuart Craig - he is an unbelievable genius and totally 
humble despite having won three Oscars. A fun spin-off from the movie has 
been spending a lot of time teaching Daniel Radcliffe magic which he has 
taken up as a hobby. He has practiced a lot and is particularly good at the 
"Linking Rings" trick which is not easy to do.

During the filming of Azkaban he was keeping people entertained on the set 
with card tricks.

--
GulPlum AKA Richard, who seems to be persona non grata at TLC 'cos they 
ignored my submission on Saturday...