Everything is Everywhere

I had a weirdly existential moment this weekend. As most of you know I make digital visual effects for movies for a living and until the end of May I'd spent 18 months working on "Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix". I still can't say what I did until the film's out so I'll fill that blank in at the start of next week. One of the few aspects of the job I dislike is going on set. This is mostly because of the boredom factor. When you are on set you are always waiting for someone to do something so you can then do your job. This results in hours of standing around, and as a natural fidget I get very restless and then I get tense and cross. Fortunately I was only required to go on set twice, once for the sequence I was to work on and the other time to comprehensively photograph the Room of Requirements so a digital version could be built. As a result of taking about 1500 photos of the place I have a very clear mental image and though it was only a set its physicality is very profoundly etched into my mind as the room was complete with ceilings forming a totally enclosed environment.

How does this translate into weird existential moments? As part of her pre-Potter film and book excitement building regime, Tinseltroos bought herself the "Order of the Phoenix" Wii game. She has been waving her Wiimote around casting spells for most of the last few evenings and last night spent a great deal of time in the Room of Requirements. As a movie tie-in the game version looks as close to the movie one as possible and it was a very odd experience to look at a very detailed virtual representation of somewhere that I had actually been in person and spent quite some time. If you aren't careful you begin to lose your grasp of what is real, what is pretend on-set real and what is fakey-real. I shall have to have a little sit-down and a cup of tea until I calm down.