Tag: barbican

Virtual Tour Video & Barbican/Gatehouse

Have you subscribed to my YouTube channel? If so, you’ve probably already seen that I posted a new work-in-progress virtual tour of my Prisoner of Azkaban Hogwarts model last week. If you haven’t subscribed yet…get on that! I’m not currently posting a lot of videos, but subscribing will make sure you know when I do.

But that’s not our main focus for today. Today we’re going to be continuing with progress after that video, building the structure from the first two films that corresponds to the gatehouse and barbican at Alnwick Castle.

As I’ve mentioned before, the filming miniature and the real location don’t always match up perfectly. I’m aiming more for the miniature, but it’s a lot easier to find reference for the real thing, so I’m having to rely on that to fill in the gaps. Here, I’ve got the basic structure of just the gatehouse built:

(This is where Neville zooms upward again on his broom before nearly impaling himself on a statue’s spear.)

Next come details on the façade facing the training grounds – windows, arrowslits, lanterns, and of course the classic Hogwarts-style torches that were added as temporary set dressing for the film shoot. The one on the right is the one that Neville’s robes catch on, slowing his fall a bit:

Note that this is a view you couldn’t have seen in any of the movies – it simultaneously shows the gatehouse (from the first two films) and the clock tower (from all but the first two films). If you looked at this angle during SS or COS, there’d be no castle visible in the background, and if you looked at this angle from POA onward…well, you’d be underground.

I should also mention that I have zero good shots of this side of the structure in the miniature, so here I’m going purely off of the real thing. Same goes for that small tower toward the left, which I haven’t detailed yet in the above render. Let’s rectify that, and add the similar tower on the other side of the gatehouse:

The flying and Quidditch lessons in Sorcerer’s Stone were both shot on location here, and these towers are seen pretty clearly, so I have no reservations about mimicking the real thing without knowing what they looked like in the miniature.

If this doesn’t look…right, it may be because Alnwick Castle is lighter, yellower, and more contrasty than the miniature. But I’m just using my main castle texture, which is based off of the most neutrally-lit photos of the miniature I’ve found. Also, this area is in direct sunlight in the film, not the shade. Plus, you know, the ground is still missing.

Anyway, on the outside of the gatehouse, let’s start adding the barbican. At the real Alnwick Castle, this was added to the gatehouse around the 14th or 15th century, greatly enhancing the castle’s defenses. I’ve had trouble finding reference for a few spots along the battlements, but this old 3D digital survey I found was helpful.

These areas in my model have really become a hybrid between the miniature and the real location:

Not too shabby! I wouldn’t want someone throwing boiling water on me from those battlements.

The part of this structure that was tweaked the most for the miniature was the entrance of the barbican. In the real world, the area outside the archway appears to be a paved semicircle, a small car park, and then the street. In centuries past, this would have been the only entrance to the grounds – basically just a really beefed-up, defensible drawbridge. But at Hogwarts, this isn’t an entrance at all. The terrain drops off pretty steeply, and so the area outside the archway is just a small terrace with no apparent purpose beyond being a lookout point. (They also swapped out the Percy lion heraldry over the archway for the Hogwarts crest, but that’s barely visible.)

If none of that is sounding familiar, it’s because it’s only seen indistinctly from great distances, and only on rare occasions, and only in the first two films, and only from the side. But blueprints and behind-the-scenes photos provide just enough insight to allow us to simulate cool new views like this:

It might look slightly more familiar from the side:

Any better? You could be forgiven for still not recognizing it. This is about the best view of the barbican exterior we ever get in the movies:

And you can’t even see the gatehouse there! So…yeah, not Hogwarts’s most distinctive feature. Still, it’s good to have it complete! Well…complete with the exception of the statues that stand on top of the ramparts. But those are full-on human figures, and I haven’t yet decided whether to sculpt them from scratch, adapt them from free models posted online, or omit them altogether.

Maybe I’ll have an answer in the next post. In the meantime, have a great weekend! Or week, or whatever, since clearly I don’t control when you’re going to be reading this.

Continuing the Curtain Walls

Relatively short post today. We’ll start off with some orthographic views of the POA model, by request. This is the state of the model before the progress you’ll see later in this post.

I always enjoy these blueprint-style perspective-less views.

Anyway, onward to today’s update. Let’s start fleshing out the remaining walls surrounding the training grounds! I’m kinda doing the COS version, since most of this is covered by a new hillside from POA onward, but that’s okay.

I hadn’t touched this area since late March 2019…crazy to think that it’s now been over 2 years since I started this whole project!

There’s not a lot of reference for this area of the miniature, but I have found some shots. Between those and photos of the real thing at Alnwick Castle, I think my results are pretty accurate. Interestingly, that guerite (small lookout tower) closest to the camera seems to have been slightly redesigned partway through the construction of the model. I’ve gone with the final design that was glimpsed – if only barely – in the films.

The next structure along the walls is Alnwick Castle’s barbican and gatehouse. (This is the building from which Neville falls and breaks his wrist in the first film.) I had already done a bit of work on this structure as part of an early attempt at recreating Alnwick itself – here’s an old render from this post:

I built this to the same scale as the main Hogwarts model, so it was easy enough to drop that into place and add brick textures:

As we’ve seen with other areas, I’ve built the walls so they go quite a ways down. From this view inside the training grounds, the lowest parts will eventually be covered up by grassy lawns. But on the outside, the terrain is rocky and uneven, and in some areas it slopes downward to reveal the lower areas of the wall. It’s easiest to just make the walls really deep and then cover a lot of it up with the terrain later on.

Fortunately, there are some nice orthographic drawings of the barbican/gatehouse structure on a placard at the location. These provide some very helpful reference. As always, my goal is to capture at least one of these, in roughly descending order of importance:

  1. The onscreen appearance and imagined reality of the castle in the films (which is achieved through a mixture of location shoots, miniatures, CGI, etc.)
  2. The main 1:24 scale VFX miniature of the whole castle
  3. The corresponding real-life filming location

These do not always agree, and there are significant gaps in the reference for the first two, so finding the right compromises can be tricky. For instance, this shot in Sorcerer’s Stone shows Neville’s POV as he nearly impales himself on a statue:

I’m not sure about the background, but the foreground architecture is all CG, and it matches neither the real-life location nor the miniature…although the corresponding spots at the location and on the miniature are never shown onscreen. To make matters worse, in the live-action location shots that follow, the statue (which I believe was installed just for the film) has moved to a different corner of the structure. So there is no single coherent reality for me to replicate.

In this particular case, my approach will be to ignore this quick shot altogether and aim instead for the real location with the added statues and other set dressings. But I’ll save that for the next post.