On loan from the library I had the luck to check out
Page to Screen: The Completely Filmmaking Journey by Bob McCabe. And from reading it I concluded that it must have taken a small city to make this series. After eight gigantic films how could it not from production to costume design and props take a small army of creative and magical individual to make an entire wizarding world?
The title of this book took the veritaserum potion and is telling the truth: From colossal movie to colossal movie, Page to Screen takes you on the complete film-making journey. Everything from how the film was set with David Heyman making the adaptations a focus of his career to signing up Steve Kloves to screen-write and Christopher Columbus to direct Sorcerer's Stone, you are taken back to the very beginning. You really think that almost every minute detail of the process was captured for this book - for us fans to relive.
The photos above and below hardly capture the quality of the books' photos. They are high quality - unlike anything you'll see pixelated on a computer screen. Some of them I wanted to take out just for myself as wall art but at last I resisted - it is a library book.
Broken into two parts, the first half of the book is about the films - each gets about 20 to 30 pages of in depth information from casting and production to character summaries. The second half of the book takes us into the costumes and locations we love and cherish. The whole book ranges through how production created our favorite people, places, and items. If you want to know how they "found the Sorcerer's Stone" or what it took to build the Whomping Willow you'll find out. Want to walk into Dolores Umbridge or Professor Slughorn's office, you can.
For fans who may want to hold onto the magic by not learning what it technologically took to make Quidditch players fly or spells to be cast,
Page to Screen might be something that younger fans should delay reading. If other fans are inspired by the world of Harry Potter to learn how it was all done, this is definitely a book to fill any wizard's bookshelf.
My only complaint with the book is its size. Definitely so big that it can't be put on an ordinary bookshelf but also if opened after x amount of times (which I think every fan will) the binding is weakened because of how heavy the 500+ pages are. Though
there is a $600 collection for all of the books authored by Bob McCabe, could this one been broken into two volumes? Perhaps. But such a small detail pales into comparison of the amount of detail that went into not only the films but this book as well.
For every fan, this really is a must!
Because my temporary copy is a library book: would I want it apart of my permanent collection and purchase it? Absolutely!
