Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Michael Seresin, BSC lends his magic to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which takes J.K. Rowling's heroes into darker terrain.

Whether on page or screen, Harry Potter is a huge phenomenon. Book sales have turned its author, J.K. Rowling, into the highest-paid writer in history, and she's only halfway through her seven-book series about the bespectacled wizard-in-training.

The latest installment of Warner Bros.' motion-picture franchise, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, offers some sizable statistics of its own. Production entailed some 180 shooting days for first-unit photography; more for second unit, which utilized up to 12 crews at a time; and 15 weeks for the model unit. Visual effects took over a year and kept more than 500 people busy at eight facilities in London and California. Virtually everything on this production was massively scaled - from the 200' bluescreens, to a Hogwarts set designed by Stuart Craig and modeled after several English locations, to castle miniatures that towered 30' in the air, to the legions of personnel involved.

"It's a bit like getting an army moving," observes Michael Seresin, BSC. As director of photography on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the New Zealand native was part of a new team commanding the troops led by Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron. [...]

Published in the June 2004 issue of American Cinematographer.