Wizarding World Art Director Alan Gilmore answers five theme park questions

One of the brains behind the design of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park was recently interviewed by Universal for a new FAQ that was posted today. In this portion, he discusses the challenges:

The film world is a very different challenge to the theme park world. In the film world the viewer is the camera. You know where your viewer is, and you can design to that viewer, composing the settings from one or two viewpoints. Whereas, with the theme park world, it has to work from every angle. We had to think about multiple angles, from a child’s point-of-view, to a very tall person’s point-of-view, and for everyone in between.

I’ll be honest, everything was challenging. We had a very good run up of two years, and it gave us a lot of time to work out the details. For example, the rock that Hogwarts sits on was daunting at first but we soon found a way to create the most realistic finish in any theme park. It is a great success. The snow was also very difficult. We really wanted to have snow everywhere, creating the most amazing snowscape and that cold Scottish feeling. Psychologically the snow creates a sense of a lower temperature. To try and bring that cold to Orlando, that is quite hard. In the end, I hope what we created gives guests a good experience!