Filming Gryffindors

Wow! What a weekend! We have most of the footage for Gryffindors filmed now, and boy was it a wild ride! Not only did it come together way faster than did, but by taking a whole weekend to film and renting a cabin to house cast and crew, it gave a way more intense “immersion” feeling to the whole experience. Let me tell you guys all about it!

You probably remember the aching feeling that lived deep in your chest for the unbearably long six months that we spent planning Sorted This Way. (And if it wasn’t a constant pain…then shame on you guys for acting like it was every time you asked us in trembling voices how long it would be until it was out.) Now picture that much planning squished into one sixth of the time, and that was planning Gryffindors.

We’d had the song written for months, but even the concept wasn’t solidified until late August. Once we had the concept down, we realized that since we intended to film outdoors, the time window in which we could comfortably film was rapidly shrinking. Here in Colorado, summer ends in August and winter starts in October. We have a handful of weeks of gorgeous changing aspens and then BOOM, snow. For example, the first day of filming (Friday, October 5), we left Denver with an inch of snow as Dana, Erik, and I hopped into Dana’s dad’s Subaru at six in the morning to head up to Idaho Springs, where we were going to film.

Our plan was to get 90% of the footage (excluding a secret cameo to be filmed in a few weeks, and a few scenes that were supposed to take place at Hogwarts itself) filmed in one weekend, so we had about thirty-five extras, dancers, and crew stay at a cabin we rented for the weekend so that we could be up at the crack of dawn and finish late at night, giving ourselves as many hours as possible to film.

What you (hopefully) won’t be able to tell from the footage is that we were all freezing cold 95% of the time. It was windy and between 20 and 40 degrees the entire weekend, and most of the time we were between five and thirty minutes walk from a car, let alone a building. Fun fact: during the filming of the dance scenes, when we were all wearing shorts (and those super cute Alivans house socks, omg), we bolted to the car about every four or five takes so that we didn’t end up curled into fetal balls, weeping on camera.

We also filmed the greenscreen segments for an entire pick-up Quidditch game, so get excited for that! We’ve done flying before, in the , but we’ve never done any actual Quidditch playing, so that should be new and exciting!

But despite the trials and tribulations, we ended up getting all the footage we needed, and everybody involved had a great time! The extras took it upon themselves to compile a list of each others’ Tumblr urls so that they could all follow each other—I call that burgeoning friendship—and Elli the Intern read the entirety of “The Fault in Our Stars,” by John Green, to a group of crying people, despite the fact that we were filming for most of the hours every day. (Did you guys even sleep?)

Erik predicts that the footage will come together quickly, despite all the special effects (and there are LOTS of them planned!), so look for the Gryffindor video in the next couple of months! Meanwhile, we have a lot in the works, so you won’t be wanting for content until it comes out! Stay tuned for exciting new parodies!