Ahead of next week’s Oscars, Vanity Fair has been publishing a series of articles examining the ‘most visually enticing’ nominees. This week they looked at Stuart Craig’s fantastic work with the production design for the Harry Potter series, and spoke to him about the Hogwarts exterior, the Room of Requirement, Gringotts, Diagon Alley, the Boathouse for Snape’s death and more. You can read some excerpts below or read the whole thing at this link.

“In the early days, every time you saw the exterior of Hogwarts, it was a big miniature, a physical miniature,” Craig says. “In the final film, for the battle, our first miniature was scanned and that became the basis of a new digital model. It was retextured in fantastic detail so that the camera could get into it much, much closer.”

“The consequence of filming real locations was that we were obliged to incorporate the locations into the model of Hogwarts. Often real places are disappointing. They’re not of your choosing. So, the skyline of Hogwarts was not as I would have wished in the early films, and I really did care about that—I was struggling with that,” he says. “As time went on and the books required a new space that we’d never seen before, like the Astronomy Tower that Dumbledore dies from, then I would grab that opportunity with both hands to change and improve the skyline of Hogwarts. I felt happy about it in the end, and most happy about it in its ruined state, actually.” Get the whole story »