I must admit, I was only an average Potterhead until I visited Warner Bros Studios and the city of Edinburgh. Now my view of Harry Potter is much more three-dimensional.

Warner Bros Studios offers a tour of the making of the Harry Potter films, so now I partially know how the magic was made on-screen. The effort and time that the cast and crew took to preserve the magical feeling was absolutely mind blowing.

The crew had to keep everything—from the set to the characters’ costumes—believable and continuous in every shot. For every costume, there were were pictures detailing every bit of a character’s costume, down to what wrist the character had a bracelet on.

I did not know before that each character had to have a wig in case during post-production they had to reshoot a scene. For example, in one of the movies Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy) had to wear a wig the entire time because he jumped in a pool after bleaching his hair, which turned his hair green. Obviously, he could not have green hair portraying the extremely blonde Draco.

Everything we saw in the Warner Bros tours was the actual thing the actors used while filming. This was the first time I went to an exhibition where they actually let you touch and walk on the real stuff. I didn’t think I would ever visit the actual Hogwarts Express and walk on the actual Hogwarts bridge! Also, the Diagon Alley set was actually the same as the Hogsmeade set—the crew just dressed the set up differently for Hogsmeade by changing the shop names and covering the set with fake snow.

All of the sets were designed with extreme care down to the smallest, least important detail. I never noticed that there were comic books in the Gryffindor common room. The books were never focused on, anyway, so when they are looked at up close the comics actually make no sense.

For the little details that were focused on, the design team had to make everything as realistic as possible. The potion book, for example, has ingredients an instructions in 100% readable English on EVERY SINGLE PAGE. And it is not a short book.

In addition to the extreme focus of entail, there was also meticulous planning even before the cast was chosen. Hundred upon hundred of sketches were Drawn for multiple sets. For example, the final blueprint for Diagon Alley was its 504th drawing. Diagon Alley has shops, so all the individual shops must have blueprints, too. One of the shops, the Magic Menagerie, has animals that form the letter shapes! Amazing.

Perhaps the grandest exhibit of all on the tour was the huge Hogwarts Castle model they used for the aerial shots. Again, there was so much detail, including stained glass windows and figurines of students just in case the camera happened to capture an open window. If the model was magnified 24 times, it would be the size of the real-life Hogwarts.

The Harry Potter films were largely filmed inside the studio, but when they were not filming inside, they were mostly in Scotland. More about that later, because as you can see I am on a writing streak.

Katie