Hannah Evans stop-motion animator and model maker : Companies and individual inspirations/ research: Harry Potter

I recently decided that I wanted to re-watch all the Harry Potter films, and they got me thinking, they employed people to make their props and make the prosthetics for all the different creatures and monsters. Aragog, the giant spider, was an animatronic not computer generated. Models for Kreature and Dobby were made, and when I was chatting to some of the guys working on Chuck Steel, some of them have made things for live action films as well as stop-motion films. Which I thought was exciting, because I hadn't really thought about that as a possibility.

I visited the Harry Potter studio's in London a couple years ago, and thought it was incredible, especially the creature room, which had the snake head from the Chamber of Secrets, Buckbeak from The Prisoner of Azakban, Hedwig, Aragog, the dementors etc.. I think the world sometimes gets a little bit caught up in how realistic computer generated images can be, but in order for the computer graphics to look real sometimes they need a physical model to build on, and if the actors are interacting with a CG character, their performance is instantly better if they have some kind of puppet/model/ object to interact with.

The video below has been filmed at the London studio showing just the creature room and some of the hand made models and gobblin head in there.

There were so many people who worked on Harry Potter films and so many additional companies brought on board to help with certain things. I haven't been able to distinguish one particular company to look into. Therefore I've briefly researched a few different companies and some individual people as well.

Nick Dudman caught my eye in particular as some one who worked with prosthetics, creature make up and animatronic puppets on the Harry Potter series. He is a multi-award winning make effects artist. He is certainly a talented guy and inspirational, it would be a priviledge to work with him.