Hasta La Ideas

As an industrial designer, it’s gratifying to see something you worked on sitting on a store shelf or showroom floor. Conversely it’s depressing when a project you toiled over gets axed and never sees the light of day. But it is set designers who must experience the most mixed emotions of all: They will spend months creating props or environments that will definitely get made–but that will then be destroyed after filming, to make room in the studio for the next project.

One grand exception of this occurred not in Hollywood, but in Leavesden, England. Bear with us while we break this down:

The L.A.-based Thinkwell Group is an “experiential design firm” that designs, among other things, amusement parks. Towards the tail end of the filming of the Harry Potter series of movies, Warner Brothers tasked Thinkwell with creating a post-film-franchise attraction, to keep the money coming in after the series’ conclusion. Thinkwell headed out to Warner Brothers’ Leavesden Studios in the UK, where all of the Potter films were produced and where the sixth was then being shot, and made a startling discovery: The filmmakers had saved nearly everything. Props, sets, models, and elaborate constructions dating all the way back to the first film had been stored in a massive airplane hanger and spilled over into a further 200 shipping containers.

As one example, check out the sick “Snake Door” from movie #2, The Chamber of Secrets. I saw it years ago, and blithely dismissed it as CG, but it’s a working motorized prop:

Nutty, no? And while the video can give you the misimpression that the door is small, check out this photo showing the scale of it:

Another thing I’d seen in the movie and assumed was CG was the Hogwarts castle:

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