There’s Something About Harry
John Seale, ASC, ACS sheds light on the worlds of Muggles and Magic in Harry Potter and
The Sorcerer’s Stone

By Pauline Rogers • Photos By Peter Mountain

For years, director Chris Columbus (Bicentennial Man, Mrs. Doubtfire, Nine Months, Home Alone 2) and cinematographer John Seale ASC, ACS (The Perfect Storm, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The English Patient, The American President, Witness) have tried to work together. However, catching Seale between pictures has been difficult. Finally, a twist of fate pushed Richard Donner’s film Timeline and Seale was available. A perfect team for the big screen version of J.K. Rowling’s (brought to the screen by Steve Kloves) first children’s novel Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone – the story of an eleven-year-old orphan who suddenly finds out that he is the child of two powerful wizards and has magical powers of his own.

The script was still in secret development when Duncan Henderson (one of the executive producers of Harry and The Perfect Storm) provided the catalyst that brought the two creative heads together. “So, I eagerly grabbed the book,” says Seale. “Like everyone else, I found it absorbing. I wanted to know what was going to happen in the next chapter. I quickly realized that bringing it to the screen was going to be an awesome job. It was going to be interesting and challenging.

“If anyone was going to be able to bring Harry’s two worlds to the screen, it would be Chris Columbus. But there would be challenges – how to bring a modicum of reality and danger to the deep dark forests filled with weird creatures. There were monsters and big giants but this was not an itty bitty kids film. There had to be a sense of danger in all this.”

One of Seale’s first concerns was how the production was going to balance out these challenges. How much was reality and how much was fantasy? What would be done in the real world and what would be done in the CGI world? “We were dealing with two different worlds and two different looks,” Seale explains. “There would be the Muggles world (human) and the Wizards’ world.” Each needed their own look – and would be populated by both worldly and otherworldly characters. Discussions with Columbus and team brought a clearer vision to the approach – and a few additional challenges that Seale hadn’t counted on. “They are just part of filmmaking life,” he says, taking the added pressure in stride.

He was committed to the project. A few little things like the strict child labor laws in Europe and the rigid historical preservation rules in England and Scotland weren’t going to slow him down or deter him. “In England, the restrictions on child actors are tough. They are extremely demanding on the children’s time, work hours and breaks. They can’t work after 7:00 P.M. We would have to schedule the crew to work around these hours.

“The children’s work hours required us to consider day for night. It was the historical buildings that then challenged us to be able to obtain the day for night without gels on the windows and doors. It was this challenge that led to stretching the negative to the full limit of the Tungsten to daylight capacities of the negative.”

The plan was to use Vision 500 stock and shoot Super 35mm anamorphic. “The reason for shooting Super 35mm was the stop on the lenses,” says Seale. “Anamorphic zooms are T4.5 and this was too slow. The best lenses (spherical) are T2.8, so this was an incredible help.

Seale needed to test the stock for both CGI elements and live action. “The biggest challenge was what to do with the castle lighting, where we needed to shoot day-for-night,” he explains. The castle locations and sets built on the studio lot in England served as Hogwarts School for wizards in training. They were the main reason for Super 35mm. Seale had to match the day for night on stage. “The castles were lit by flambeaus,” Seale explains. “These are mighty fire torches. To match the flame we needed a warm feeling coming off the fixtures.

“If we continued the day for night then the problem was that we had 5 to 10 thousand Kelvin and couldn’t change it in the usual way, with gels on windows for color and density. It was the daylight that we wanted for moonlight that was out of control. Keeping the Tungsten down that low and we had no control over the window light. This challenge had to be re-enacted on stage to match the location work,” he adds.

“Something always comes out of a challenge,” he continues. “I just had to bite the bullet, so to speak. Normally, I don’t go across that color range in the negative – red to blue (or Tungsten to daylight). You can’t time it out properly. We started by going straight in the cross-over between daylight and Tungsten. Because the flambeaus go warmer on the Tungsten it looked fantastic. The blue of night was so blue it went past the evil blue and went to fantasy blue. It really enhanced the Hogwarts castle in moonlight. You don’t know if it is real or a magical apparition – which is essentially what we wanted.

“The very cobalt blue against the warm flambeau flames was quite interesting and I fell in love with it. I wouldn’t necessarily use it on another film but for Harry Potter it worked.”

Even though Seale had found a formula for the Hogwarts lighting scheme, he still had a few more challenges for these complex locations. “We were shooting in winter,” he recalls. “That meant daylight was only five or six hours long. We had to make use of every bit of daylight available. That meant really big HMI guns that would balance the light (and firelight from flambeaus) as consistently as possible from early morning through daylight and back to HMI when the daylight quit.

“We were working at a T2.8 wide open almost every day – which was a real challenge for the focus pullers.”

Fortunately, not all of Hogwarts School was done on location in historical castles. Production designer Stuart Craig created elaborate interiors on stage in England. “We were at the same studio where they shot Sleepy Hollow, Star Wars, James Bond, etc.,” Seale recalls. “The sound stages aren’t exactly ideal. They have steel girders in the ceilings, which are only about 30 feet high. In many places, we had to put the lights into the girders. The challenge here was to keep the lights out of the shot, get maximum use out of the set, and keep the shadows from the girders out of the sets.”

To ease the challenges of shooting these interiors, “we resolved that the place did have gas lighting,” Seale says. “Some of the interiors would just look ludicrous with flambeaus. We wanted to play them warm and fairly open to the outside. So, we grabbed hold of the medieval castle concept and amalgamated it with modern concepts.

“A prime example is the sequence where Harry and his new-found friends at Hogwarts try to find their young woman friend Hermione to tell her there is a troll in the castle,” Seale adds. “The sequence starts in the Great Hall, becomes a chase through the Cloisters, and ends in Hermione’s bathroom. We used Lightning Strikes over the entire scene, from The Great Hall through to the bathroom. It was the Lightning Strikes that created the kinetic energy.

“Our flambeaus were designed so that we could put 10K Tungsten lamps inside. These would light through the flames,” he explains. “We chose high wattage bulbs for the flambeaus so that we could get the distance and direction we needed when we dimmed them down to a lower voltage. The challenge here was in syncing the lamps and the flames. First, we had to turn the bulbs on and warm the glass before we set the fires. Needless to say, the cabling had to be rigged for high temperature and fireproof.

“We also had to coordinate bulb and flame for the sequences where the fire either popped on or off, depending on the story moment,” he adds. “To add to this punch, we augmented some of our sets by hiding projection bulbs in covers. These were all on dimmer boards so the color temperature could be controled. We also had 20 odd 20ks, an assortment of 10ks and at least 40 to 50 Blondies to augment the light. Not to mention the 70k Lightning Strikes equipment. There was a lot of fire power on this set.”

Whenever he could, John Seale made use of the flambeaus designed by Stuart Craig. “These were wonderful lamps suspended under gargoyles,” he explains. “They had the 10k bulbs in them as well. The flames pushed some three feet out from the wall. Often times, the heat would build so high that we had to switch the fires off. Not only did the crew get hot but we were constantly concerned about our young actors who were wearing heavy costumes. Then there was the smoke, which filled the sets so much that we were unable to see what we were doing.

Because there were several units working in the Great Hall at the same time (first unit, model unit, CGI etc.) this set was hot all the time. “We couldn’t cannibalize it for other sets, so the lighting budget was horrific,” Seale admits. “It was a massive electrical job which gaffer John ‘Biggles’ Higgins did a great job of manning.”

Harry’s “other home” is the world of the Muggles and the Dursley house where he has lived for close to 11 years. “We treated the Muggles world as contemporary and rather normal,” says Seale. “We didn’t change anything. Lighting was the way we would do contemporary sets. Lenses tended to be longer as opposed to the wider lenses we used at Hogwarts. While we would ‘bend’ the corners in the castle all the time to give it that magical feeling, we kept the ‘real’ world straight and vertical.”

Harry’s adopted family lives in a ticky tacky area of sameness streets and sameness houses. Because they were forced to take him in as a young child, they weren’t really prepared for another life in their little world. This was their excuse for using the closet under the stairs as Harry’s bedroom. “It was a tiny area, so we had to build three different ‘closets’ so that we could get a variety of angles and cameras on cranes into the room,” Seale explains. “We determined that Harry’s ‘room’ was adjacent to an internal garage. Stuart added a ventilation port in the wall. This became a lighting port. There was an additional port in the door of the closet and it was a brass ship’s port that could open and close.

“In the beginning of the story, when Mrs. Dursley wakes Harry up, she throws the ship’s port open. It is the only light in the room. We used open eye Inkies through the port, which had vertical strips of light that made the impression of a jail and bars. This threw bar-like patterns on his face to make the room look like the prison it really was. At various times in the story, we made use of the port, slamming the bars closed or open, to emphasize the moment.”

Production also created several massive exteriors on the lot, matching the exteriors shot on location. One of these was the street around the Dursley house. “This is where we meet Hogwarts’ headmaster Albus Dumbledore (Richard Harris). The first inkling that he is ‘other worldly’ is when he uses his infamous ‘putter outer’ to control the streetlights.

“We lit the scene as a misty wet night,” he explains. “We added smoke and wet the street. It was a contemporary moonlit scene. Most of the light came from 6k and 18k HMIs with half CTO in a light box that Biggles built for us. Some of the lamps had half blue on them – not anywhere near the blue of Hogwarts, but a blue for moonlight.

“As Dumbledore points his tool at the street lights, which were 2 kilowatt bulbs in the lamp housing with supplementary lights to boost the effect connected to a dimmer system, they went out,” Higgins explains.

“In post, they will add a little lighting effect on the face. Simple, but effective,” says Seale.

When Harry finally learns that he is the son of two legendary wizards, he must journey from the Muggles world to that of Hogwarts and the wizards. The transition between the two worlds takes place at a train station where Harry is to board a train at platform “9 3/4” — which, of course, does not exist in the real world. “We shot the boarding sequence at Kings Cross Railroad Station in London,” Seale explains. “Another interesting challenge.”

This is the first time a production company has been allowed to shoot on this location. “With restrictions,” Seale says. “We could only use the location on Sunday and we couldn’t use any lights on stands that were higher than the distance to the platform. If they fell over, they would have to hit platform and not tracks.”

There was quite a bit of work to do in this location, with children, principal actors, and extras. This is where Harry leaves the Muggles’ world and where he returns after studying to be a powerful wizard. “We decided to use big HMIs on smaller stands,” Seal explains. “Fortunately, there was a bridge that cut the station in half. We were able to put six big lights up in this area, allowing us to extend the short days well into the night. We simply slowly transferred the light to HMI lighting as we lost the natural light.

“In pre-production, we found another lighting possibility. We brought a helium balloon to the location and showed the people from the station that we could safely attach it to the center wall and float it above the location. It was safe and so would the gas bottle and lamp. We had three of them on the shoot and they were a godsend and were supplied by Helium Balloons of London.”

Seale found another challenge in the cast. “We had wonderful young actors,” he says enthusiastically. “However, I found that English children are very pale. Their skin is almost translucent. When we tested the children, we found that they were very white. Make up could do only so much. So, when we did sequences like these, transitioning from one world to another, we added an 81A or 85B filter.

Sometimes, we used a filter on the camera but that becomes a little difficult. So, I gave the lab the filter and they included that effect in the timing of the work print. They used this as a key for the transition between the two worlds on this location and others.”

Before the Dursleys relinquish Harry to the world of his wizard family, they run from the otherworldly intrusion to a series of hiding places. This is where a wonderful character from the Wizard world called Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) comes into their lives. The Dursley family takes Harry to a shake on a cliff.

“Second unit did a wonderful job with the aerial shots of dusk over the rocky island,” says Seale.

“Originally, we thought they would hide in an old lighthouse. But, we ended up with a wonderful two story shack that was sparse and austere.” Stuart Craig created this house on stage. He put big cracks in the walls so that the lightning could filter into the room. “Again, the Lightning Strikes machines from outside and a mixture of 150 watt peppers and redheads connected to a dimmer flicker effect for the embers of the fire inside. Simple, but effective.”

To light Hagrid’s house, which was on Hogwarts’ property, Seale relied mainly on fireplace light and several basic little candles in iron fixtures. He cheated the candelabra hanging from the ceiling for extra light and added rice paper to the windows for a soft glow. He also let the walls go dark. “We maintained the magical glow with warm Tungsten lights and the moonlight was full blue HMIs to match the day for night.

“Anticipation really is the key to making every project work,” Seale comments. “It is the mainstay of the film industry. On this project, each department worked especially hard to anticipate the needs of the other departments. Stuart was very collaborative and we discussed, heavily, all stage lighting.

“Biggles, too, was a godsend on this picture. I watched him running around Durham Cathedral, making the lights work as quickly as possible when the light changed on us without notice. He made the sets work for us, no matter what the challenge.

“I think one of the biggest costs on this picture was in replacing the batteries in my spot meter,” Seale jokes. “Everything changed so quickly, I kept wearing them out.”

Ask John Seale about other interesting shots in Harry Potter and he’ll get this devilish look on his face. You know there is a lot more to talk about – but he’s been sworn to secrecy. Warner Bros. has instructed everyone to keep lips sealed about a lot of Hogwarts’ “other world.” John Seale might have had a lot to do with Mirror Portholes, Quidditch games, Harry’s friend Hagrid and an evil wizard named Voldemort – but so did Rob Legato and his CGI team, as well as the first unit effects wizards. Getting ready for those elements is for another discussion, maybe next year.

For now, the reader has to be satisfied with the challenges of the day – child labor laws, historical buildings, protected locations, fire light and day for night shots as well as perspective nightmares. “Yes, it was one of the biggest challenges we’ve had to face,” says Seale. “But, it was worth it. When I saw the work print at Technicolor London, it was wonderful. I was very happy with the amazingly magical look. Chris Columbus did a wonderful job of bringing a wonderful edge to this story – and I enjoyed every minute of the production.” •