New LEGO Harry Potter animation coming tomorrow! You can join the YouTube Premiere here.

The story is a kind of "What If" story. What if the person who opened the Chamber of Secrets in year two never got caught? What if Hogwarts had to close because of this? The animation starts with Lucius Malfoy declaring in a press conference that all staff and students are forced to stay at home, in a kind of quarantine, while the culprit is apprehended. The rest of the film focuses on certain staff members, showing how they spend their free time, away from Hogwarts.

I wrote the story with my fiancée. We're both huge potterheads, so we were discussing the Wizarding World while we were in COVID-19 quarantine. The base of the story was Dumbledore's chocolate frog card, which states:

"Enjoys chamber music and ten pin bowling."

So we thought if forced into quarantine, Dumbledore would definitely be practicing on his instrument. We started brainstorming ideas about what the other professors might be doing at home, what their hobbies are, and these ideas developed into a short film. The animation focuses on Dumbledore, McGonagall, Lockhart, Hagrid and Mr. Weasley, each of whom have different ideas on how to occupy themselves during lockdown.

This film marks a milestone for me. This is the first animation I'm making on the new PC I custom-built. The PC is strong enough for CG animation and more complex VFX, so I tried some things in this I've never tried before. There are 3D animated elements rendered with Blender, bluescreen compositions created with DaVinci Resolve and a short little 2D animation made with Krita. The production on this film was very slow, because I had to learn a few things from scratch: using Resolve, the fundamentals of 3D animation and a new DAW for music production, but in the end I think it was worth it.

Stay tuned for the premiere tomorrow! I worked a lot on this film, so I really hope you'll like it!

Thanks for reading!