If you’re following Tom Felton on Twitter (and, who isn’t? He has almost a quarter of a million followers!!), you’ll already know that Tom Felton is temporarily back in London doing some work on the set for the last movie of the Harry Potter franchise, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”
On his Twitter yesterday he wrote:
Back at Hogwarts getting a head cast. You guess what for. x
And again today he wrote:
Just had my body cast in plaster. Very odd feeling! So nice when it comes off! Will be the last time I do that for HP. Quite sad really x
It’s a good guess that he is getting prep work done for the final epilogue scene in Harry Potter, where the cast will be aged 19 years to the ripe old age of 36.
In a previous interview with MTV, David Yates gave more details on the process he planned to use for this momentous scene – a scene will be the climax of decades of ground-breaking film history. Yates said that they will use CGI technology to make the young actors look older, and part of that process requires creating plaster molds of the actors which are then digitized.
“There’s something extraordinary about the audience’s knowledge of them when they were this high and then seeing them where they are 38,” he said. “There’s something really beautiful about that circle, so it has to be them. I think if after seven or eight movies, we recast them in that last scene — we all thought, ‘No way, we can’t do that.’ ”
Recent films like “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Terminator Salvation” have employed cutting-edge CGI technology to make Brad Pitt and Arnold Schwarzenegger look youthful or elderly, and Yates plans to use a similar approach in “Deathly Hallows.”
[Dan] Radcliffe admitted that he always feared the epilogue: “This is the last image people are going to have of the films, and I’d rather they did it with other actors than did it with us and it looked bad.”
But after seeing how realistically visual effects modified an actor’s age in “Benjamin Button,” he’s become a convert. “I might get to see what I’d look like if I was 5-foot-8, which will be a thrill for me!” he laughed.