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.