So I know I’m behind, but I still want to tell all about the
other places I went and the other things I did while at Cambridge. I actually
finished the program today and am flying home, but let’s still go back to where
we left off in the last post. : )
So we got back from Brussels at about 11 in the morning, and
at noon we went and had a BYU group lunch at a delicious pizza place in
Cambridge, courtesy of Dr. Kerry. Dr. Kerry is the head of the program for BYU,
so I guess he’s called the program director or advisor or something. I don’t
really know what he’s called. But he taught our prep class at BYU before we
went to Cambridge, and he actually taught one of the courses at Cambridge
during the program. Anyway, Dr. Kerry is the nicest, most genuine professor
that I have ever met. I have never known a professor that cares so much about
his students and who continuously follows up with them to make sure that they
are doing okay. He organized lots of little BYU gatherings for us while we were
at Cambridge so that he could see how we were doing, offer us help, and give us
advice on fun things to see or do. It’s thanks to him that most of us BYU
students came to Cambridge, so we are all really grateful for everything he has
done for us.
In the afternoon I had a lecture, and unfortunately, by this
point, the lack of sleep was starting to kick in. I started to crash about
halfway through the lecture but managed to keep taking notes somehow. Going
back and looking at them, though, I discovered that they were basically
gibberish and indecipherable. Luckily, we didn’t need to know any of it for the
final. : )
The next couple days we spent studying for our module two
finals. The King’s library is amazing, but not a great place to study because I
just end up staring at all the different books or watching the tourists out the
windows. The library itself is gorgeous, and it is stuffed full of really old
books. I absolutely love old books! On a random side note, there was this
amazing antique bookshop just across the street and down an alley from King’s.
It had first edition copies of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit, The Chronicles of Narnia, and many others. We found a copy of Jane Eyre from the 1800s, and if I
wasn’t a poor college student who still needs to go to graduate school, I
totally would have bought it. One day I’ll go back and get it. Hopefully. They
also had tons of old bibles and psalm books, miniature books with Shakespeare
plays, and prints from the 1800s. I did buy the book of Esther from an old
Latin bible that was supposedly from c. 1550. I have no idea why they were only
selling pages of old bibles and not the whole book, but luckily Esther is
pretty short so I could afford it. : ) We literally spent hours in this shop,
going through all of the old books. I just love the feel of antique bookshops!
Anyway, back to the King’s library. It was beautiful and
full of old books and had tons of little rooms with big windows, so it was
basically perfect. The floorboards creaked when you walked on them, so that was
a bit distracting too. I loved how the books were just shoved onto the
shelves—they would line them up all neatly at first, but then when they ran out
of room, they would start stacking books in the spaces between shelves. It was
great.
On Friday we had our final exams in the large examination
room again. I liked the science essays better because you can just throw out
everything you know and not worry too much about structure, but with philosophy
essays, you can’t really do that. You have to actually form a cohesive argument
and have it logically flow and whatnot. Ick. I definitely thought I did okay on
my first essay, but my second one I wasn’t so sure of. I was just super happy
to be done, and not only was I done with my philosophy class, I was done with
classes completely! It felt nice.
After we all finished exams, we did something I had been
looking forward to ever since I had found out I was going to England. We went
to the Harry Potter Studio Tour!!! AHHHHHH!!!!
Warning—this post is super long and is mostly just me
geeking out over all the cool stuff we got to see, so feel free to just browse
through the pictures. : )
We had already booked our tickets online for a specific time
(because that’s the only way to do it since this thing sells out super fast),
so six of us split a cab and headed down to Leavesden. When we got there, we
all kind of freaked out before we even went inside the building because they
had several of the chess pieces form the first movie set up outside.
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| The group (minus Taylor) outside the studio! |
We went in and had a little bit of time before our scheduled
tour, so we decided to have a look around the shop first. Plus, we wanted to
kind of see what kind of stuff there was to buy and then have a couple hours to
think about it before making any impulsive purchases. ; ) We all got pictures
in
Hogwarts robes and checked out the different wands you could buy, and then
we went on in to the tour itself.
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| Three Ravenclaws, a Gryffindor, and a Slytherin! |
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| Look at this shop. I could live in this shop. |
They let in our group to a room with TV screens on all the
walls and started out the tour by showing us this little interview thing with
David Heyman (the producer of the Harry Potter movies) about how they found
Harry Potter and decided that they wanted to make it into a film. They then led
us into a theater room where we took a seat and then watched another short
video with the actors who played Harry, Ron, and Hermione. They told us all
about how Leavesden was like their home and how all the people behind the
scenes were like their family, and then there was this little montage showing
clips from all the movies. Finally, they raised the screen to show that the
doors to the Great Hall were right behind it, and we got to go in. Our group of
six was definitely the most excited of all the tourists there. We were all
pretty much living the dream. : )
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| The statues outside the Great Hall! |
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| A table in the Great Hall! |
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| Me in front of the doors to the Great Hall! |
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| The Great Hall |
After we wandered around the Great Hall for a bit, they let
us into one of the two main warehouses, and then we were basically left on our
own to go at our own pace for the rest of the tour. There were little short
videos about all the different directors for the movies, and they each told a
little bit of how they had come up with their vision for Hogwarts and their
Harry Potter movie. Props and costumes were scattered throughout, and they
often had entire rooms set up exactly as they appeared in the movie. They had a
makeup table set up to show all the different things they would use to make the
actors look like their characters, and they even had all the different wigs
that the actors had to wear. They even had dark mark tattoos sitting on the
table. It was fantastic!
We got to see Hermione’s dress from the Yule Ball and Ron’s
atrocious dress robes next to one of the tables that was in the Great Hall for
that scene, and I was weird to me how different everything looked up close.
There was so much detail in all of the outfits, so much intricate beading and
stitching that I never really noticed when watching the movies. You could
definitely tell that a lot of hard work went into making each and every one of
the costumes the characters wore. There was also a cool rack that had half a
dozen versions of Harry’s outfit from the last part of the final movie. You
could see the progression from how it started out mostly clean to then how it
was dirty and burned and torn by the end of the Battle of Hogwarts. They were
even labeled to show which takes and scenes they were to be worn in! I had
never even thought about that before, how they needed to make the actors’
clothes progressively dirtier throughout certain scenes.
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| Hermione's Yule Ball dress! Along with Krum's and Cedric's and Cho's outfits. |
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| Aw. Ron's dress robes. Poor Ron. |
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| The fake ice sculpture from the Yule Ball |
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| The progression of Harry's clothes in the Battle of Hogwarts |
We got to see a wall with Umbridge’s educational decrees
from the fifth movie, the gates to Hogwarts with the winged boars, and a table
set up with delicious fake desserts that were on the tables in the Great Hall
at Hogwarts. We also learned that they used forced perspective in one of the
scenes at the Leaky Cauldron because they had the fake hallway that they used.
It started out like a regular-sized hallway, but then it was only a couple of
yards long as they shrunk down the rest of the hall to make it look much
longer. Way cool!
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| The winged boars at the entrance gates to Hogwarts! |
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| Yummy looking fake chocolate. It looks so good. |
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| The forced perspective hallway. So the front part is big enough to stand in, but it gets smaller and smaller so the back of the hall is really tiny. |
We got to see Harry’s dormitory, and once again, there was
so much detail that I missed in the movies! You could tell which bed belonged
to each boy based on all the stuff they had lying out. We also saw the
Gryffindor common room and the staircase up to the dormitories, and in the
common room they had more outfits that Harry, Ron, and Hermione wore. There was
the invisibility cloak too, and it looked really weird because it was green on
one side so that it could be treated like a green screen but then patterned on
the other side so that you could actually see it when Harry wasn’t wearing it
and was just carrying it.
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| Gryffindor boys' dormitory! |
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| Gryffindor common room, with Hermione's and Ron's outfits from the third movie. |
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| The stairs up to the dormitories. I guess those stairs don't really go anywhere though. That's depressing. |
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| Look guys, I'm in the Gryffindor common room! |
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| Harry's invisibility cloak |
We got pictures in front of the Mirror of Erised and saw the
portrait of the Fat Lady that concealed the entrance to the Gryffindor common
room. They had the costumes of members of the Order of the Phoenix, and they
also had the big clock pendulum used in the third movie.
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| Look! We were so happy that we saw ourselves in the Mirror of Erised! |
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| The Fat Lady's portrait |
They had the entrance to Dumbledore’s office, which was way
cool, and we learned that it really did spin to reveal a spiral staircase. The
staircase was just hidden in the floor in a really long tube-like thing.
Dumbledore’s office itself was amazing because there were two Dumbledore
mannequins in it, one dressed like the first actor that played Dumbledore in
the first two movies and then another one dressed like the second actor that
played Dumbledore in the rest of the movies. I was really sad when the first
actor that played Dumbledore died, because I thought that he was the perfect
Dumbledore. The office also had the sorting hat, the sword of Gryffindor, the
cabinet with the pensieve, and the rotating
shelf with all the vials of memories. All the portraits were amazing too.
Basically, once again, I was stunned by the level of detail.
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| The entrance to Dumbledore's office! |
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| Dumbledore's office! |
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| Look at the teeny tiny little memory vials! They are so cool! |
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| Oh look, I'm in Dumbledore's office now! |
They also had cases containing the Triwizard Cup, a golden
egg from the second task, the Goblet of Fire, and all the horcruxes that were
objects (the diadem, the cup, the locket, the ring, and the diary, not Nagini
or Harry).
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| The Triwizard Cup and the golden egg from the fourth movie! |
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| Tom Riddle's diary with the basilisk fang! |
We then got to see some of the stuff from the classrooms,
including the giant dragon skeleton from the Defense Against the Dark Arts
classroom. They also had the entire potions classroom, complete with the
self-stirring cauldrons and the outfits of Snape and Slughorn. They even had
the tiny vial of Felix Felicis!
The jars were full of odd-looking specimens,
and the desks were covered with potions ingredients and books. It was so cool
to be able to see sets like this that were identical to how they appear in the
movies.
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| Look I'm in potions class! |
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| Snape in potions class. |
Another cool thing we saw were some of the portraits that
hung on the walls in Hogwarts. All of them were hand-painted, and many of the
portraits were actually people that worked on the movies! We saw portraits of
David Heyman and David Yates as well as some other members of the crew. It was
great that they got to appear in the movies this way. Obviously these portraits
didn’t move, but they showed us how even for the moving ones, they dressed up
members of the crew and filmed them to put in the moving portraits.
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| Portraits!!! |
There was a whole section that had different doors, like the
doors to the front entrance of Hogwarts with all the different locks that were
individually mechanized, the door to the vault at Gringotts that once again had
individually mechanized pieces that locked together, and the door to the
Chamber of Secrets with the snake heads that actually moved. Super cool!
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| The entrance to the Chamber of Secrets!!! |
There was also a section that had different vehicles. There
was a Gringotts cart, Sirius’ motorbike with the sidecar, Mad-Eye Moody’s weird
chair broom thing, and regular brooms. This then led to a quidditch section
with the team uniforms and different kinds of brooms, along with the box
holding the different types of balls.
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| The Gringotts cart!!! |
One of the coolest parts of visiting the Studio Tour was
actually a temporary exhibit. There was a place where you could sit on a broom
in front of a green screen wearing Hogwarts robes, and they would make it look
like you were flying around the quidditch pitch or around Hogwarts and London.
It was so cool! They even had little fans that blew on you so it looked like
your hair was blowing in the wind. There was also a part where everyone could
get in the flying Ford Anglia in front of a green screen, so we all crammed
inside that for a picture. Unfortunately, the pictures cost a fortune, and they
wouldn’t let you take your own. Very upsetting. But I wasn’t about to pay $20
for a single picture of me on a broom, though I was very tempted.
Another one of the rooms on display was the kitchen of the
Burrow, which is the house the Weasleys lived in. The costumes of the Weasley
family were on display inside, along with the knitting needles that knitted by
themselves and the frying pan that scrubbed itself. There were so many little
details that I had never noticed before, like the box of cheeri owls cereal. :
)
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| The Burrow! I love the self-knitting needles and the self-scrubbing pan that are in here : ) |
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| A box of cheeri owls! I thought that this was hilarious! |
Next we saw the vanishing cabinet Malfoy uses in the sixth
movie to sneak Death Eaters into Hogwarts, and next to it was the fireplace
from Malfoy Manor with the costumes of the Malfoy family, Voldemort, Bellatrix,
a Death Eater, and a Snatcher. I always knew that Voldemort’s robes had a tinge
of green to them, but I didn’t realize that Bellatrix’s robes did as well! Her
skirt also has these really tiny silver swirly patterns too.
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| Voldemort and Bellatrix! |
A whole section of the tour was devoted to the Ministry of
Magic, and this section was really interesting. The walls of the ministry look
like they are cold marble or something similar because they look really shiny,
but the tiles are actually made of wood! Umbridge’s office was on display as
well with all of her pink stuff and her kitten plates, and we learned that as
Umbridge got more and more evil, her outfits got pinker and pinker, which I
found hilarious. They had some of the orbs on display from the Hall of
Prophecy, and we learned that 15,000 of these were handmade before director
David Yates decided that he wanted to have them be entirely CGI. If I had been
working on those handmade orbs, I would have been ticked! Speaking of how many
of these orbs there were, we also learned that by the end of the films, the
props team had amassed a collection of 5,000 pieces of furniture, 12,000
handmade books, 17,000 wand boxes, and 40,000 individual Weasleys’ Wizard
Wheezes products. Insane! Why can’t that be my job? I would totally love to
make Harry Potter props all day long. Too bad the films are done, or I would
want to drop out of school to be on the props team. : )
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| The "Magic is Might" monument. It actually says that "Magic is Might" but you can't see it because of the lovely spotlight they have trained on it. |
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| Me and Nicole and Taylor just chilling in front of the Magic is Might statue. You can see the poor muggles being squished. |
Going along with the astounding level of detail, there was
also a little stand where one of the people who helped make the brooms for the
movies showed you how they put together the twigs by hand for the broom tails.
He told the tourists stories about his days on set and the scenes he got to see
filmed. It turns out that for the scenes in the ministry, they just used
members of the crew and props teams as the extras! I liked all the little nods
to the different people that worked behind the scenes in the movie, because
they don’t often get a lot of attention since they aren’t recognizable like the
actors. Everyone wants to hear what the actors have to say, but rarely do
people interview members of the crew to learn about movies, which is sad,
because it is really thanks to them that the movies are as amazing as they are.
One of my favorite displays was the one with all the
different books and papers used in the movies. They had copies of A History of Magic, Rita Skeeter’s book
about Dumbledore, The Tales of Beedle the
Bard, potion making books, defense against the dark arts books, and
notebooks that Hermione wrote in. There were books that I didn’t even remember
seeing in the movies, but they looked incredible. They also had the Marauder’s
Map, Hogwarts acceptance letters, tickets for Platform 9 ¾, tickets to the Yule
Ball, Dumbledore’s will, copies of the Daily Prophet newspaper and the Quibbler
magazine, and the letter from Lily to Sirius from a scene that was cut out of
the movie. All of these were hand-made, and they looked stunning. I wanted to
buy copies of these! I really wanted some of the Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes
product labels though, especially the U-No-Poo one (the constipation sensation
that’s gripping the nation!).
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| Hogwarts acceptance letters and copies of the Daily Prophet! |
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| Why can't my textbooks be cool like these? |
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| The letter Lily wrote to Sirius that was in a scene that got cut from the movie! I didn't know they actually had a letter all ready for the scene. |
The Tour then took us outside to see some of the outdoor
sets including the Knight bus, the Tom Riddle gravestone with the wicked awesome
grim reaper thing, the bridge that lead from the Hogwarts grounds to the
castle, some more chess pieces, another Ford Anglia and motorcycle with a side
car, and some more chess pieces. The two coolest things, though, were the
outside of Number 4, Privet Drive and Harry’s parents’ house in Godric’s
Hollow. They also sold butterbeer out here so that you could drink it as you
walked around the sets, and let me just say, it is SO DELICIOUS. If I could
live off of liège waffles and butterbeer for the rest of my life, I totally
would. I’ve tried making butterbeer before with recipes that I’ve found online,
but none of them tasted as good as this stuff. Too bad we couldn’t buy 2 liter
bottles of the stuff to bring home.
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| Paying a visit to Number 4, Privet Drive! |
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| At the Potters' cottage in Godric's Hollow. . . or the back lot of the studio. . . same thing. |
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| The chess pieces from the first movie. |
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| The bridge at Hogwarts! Apparently it isn't actually a bridge. It sits on the ground. |
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| Butterbeer!!! So delicious!!! |
We then went into a second warehouse that had the creatures
exhibition. This was super cool, because once again, the level of detail is
astounding. We saw inferi, Fawkes the phoenix, heads from dragons and mermaids,
mandrakes, thestrals, Grawp’s head, acromantula (these things are freaky), and
some fake owls.
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| An acromantula. These things are so freaky. I hate spiders. |
We got to see Dobby with his bloodstained outfit from when
he died in the seventh movie (so sad!) and other mannequins meant to look like
people. They had mannequins of the actors that were scaled down so that they
could be used in certain shots or to make their surroundings look bigger.
Speaking of making things look bigger, we learned how they
made Hagrid look so large in the movies. Hagrid is a half-giant, so he is
supposed to be really big, but obviously the actor that plays Hagrid isn’t. To
fix this, what they did was get someone who actually was about seven feet tall and
put him on stilts and had him dress up as Hagrid. This still didn’t make him
tall enough, and then you had the obvious problem that he doesn’t look like the
actor who plays Hagrid. To fix this, they made a fake Hagrid head that looked
totally real and whose facial movements they could control by remote control.
This could then be worn by the person on stilts in the costume. They used this
Hagrid in all the shots that weren’t close-ups of Hagrid’s face, and from a
distance it looks pretty convincing. They showed us how they could move this
fake Hagrid’s eyes and eyebrows, and the whole thing was pretty incredible.
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| Diagon Alley! THE Diagon Alley! |
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| In front of Ollivander's wand shop! |
We then went to room where they had tons of white card
models of various places in the movies. These white card models were made to
help figure out the size and scale of everything, and tiny little cameras
called lipstick cameras were put in the models to figure out what camera angles
to use. I didn’t even realize that they planned all this stuff out beforehand,
but I guess it makes sense so that they know exactly what to film and how to
film it.
We saw white card models of Hogsmeade, which was super cool
because there were so many little buildings with little windows and chimneys.
They had a white card model of Hogwarts too, and I really wish that they sold
these in kits so that you could build one yourself. On the walls of the room
were very detailed design sketches of lots of the important props in the
movies, and there were also paintings of lots of the more picturesque locations
in the movie. I would definitely hang some of these up in my house if I had
them.
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| White card model of Hogsmeade. |
Not only did they have white card models of the exteriors of
buildings, they also had models of the interiors as well, such as the inside of
Dumbledore’s office or the inside of Ollivander’s wand shop. There were even little pieces of white card furniture in some of the rooms!
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| White card model of Hagrid's Hut. Look at the little table and chairs! |
The coolest part of the whole studio tour, though, was saved
for last. I thought that the white card model of Hogwarts was way awesome, but
what was even better was the even bigger model of Hogwarts that took up nearly
an entire room and looked incredibly real (except for the fact that it wasn’t
life-sized). They had music from the movie soundtracks playing, and then every
few minutes or so they would change the lighting so that you could see the
castle model at night, complete with little lights shining out of the miniscule
windows. We could walk around it and see the castle from every angle, and it
was absolutely gorgeous! It was the perfect end to the studio tour. : )
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| I might have kind of been in shock at this point. |
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| Look at beautiful Hogwarts! |
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| Ooh, Hogwarts at night! |
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| Hogwarts from the lake. Wouldn't it be way awesome if this castle was real? |
The end of the tour spit you back out into the gift shop,
but in the room right before the gift shop had hundreds of wand boxes. Each
wand box had a name, and there was one for every person that ever worked on the
Harry Potter films. It was cool to see how many people were actually involved
in making the movies, and there were a lot!
After making the hard decisions of what souvenirs to buy in
the gift shop (I basically wanted to buy everything), we took a taxi home.
Going to the studio tour was definitely one of the highlights of my trip! I’m
still a Harry Potter fanatic, even though all the books and movies have been
out for years now. It was just great to see in real life the places that I grew
up imagining and then watching in movies. I am definitely part of the Harry
Potter generation! : )
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| A sign for Hogwarts in a pile of tons of random props. |
