We went to Warner Brothers’ “Making of Harry Potter” Studio Tour, which is very good. Even if you think you know all the tricks of the trade in 21st Century big budget film making, the scale of the thing is amazing – a 1:24 model of Hogwarts. Also the attention to detail – thousands of props to dress sets that make only momentary appearances on screen. For days afterwards, every time I saw something bright green I assumed it would be edited out later in chromakey.
Then we went to Future Cinema’s Bugsy Malone. The Troxy makes the perfect venue, already being a rough approximation to Fat Sam’s. We enjoyed the atmosphere, we enjoyed the entertainment, we enjoyed the film, and we even enjoyed being splurged as the venue erupted into a replica of the mayhem on screen.
Brilliant!
At first sight, recorded media is a one-way trip from real life action to canned repetition, a butterfly skewered in a glass case. But what if you could reverse the direction of travel? Can you make a great live experience from a movie after the fact? These two things seem to prove that you can.
Matt Edgar writes here 