Or perhaps the more appropriate gif to use would be…

Or…

Or even…

By this point, you’ve probably figured out the subject of this post, but in case you haven’t: it’s Harry Potter.

More specifically, my class recently did projects revolving around the Harry Potter franchise. In similar fashion to the Star Wars blue sky project, and the blue sky project at the end of last year, this project involved coming up with an inquiry question and building a project based on answering it, and culminated in an open-house style exhibition for our families, teachers and peers to see our projects.

I went through several inquiry questions, most of which got rejected or just didn’t have as much potential for a project as I first thought. Some of the ones I didn’t end up doing included “What is the etymology of some of the spells and potions? What might this say about their history?”, “Is there a better way to sort the students than with the existing houses? What might a better method be?” and “Can I just bake and decorate the world’s best Harry Potter themed cupcakes and have each one represent a different character and explain why?” (A question which I definitely did not think of at three AM while fretting over how to make a project suitable to the exhibitor style, and which definitely would have gotten approved had I actually pitched it. Definitely.)

Oh, and also “What exactly is the function of a rubber duck?”.

However, the question I eventually ended up with was “What would the impact of including the St. Mungo’s scene from the fifth Harry Potter book in the movie be?”.

The St. Mungo’s scene, if you don’t already know, is a scene, or rather a few scenes which I merged into one, that takes place in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, in which Arthur Weasley is in the wizard hospital after getting attacked by Voldemort’s snake, a predicament he was only saved from because Harry witnessed the attack in a dream. While at St. Mungo’s, Harry, Ron, Hermione and Ginny stumble across Gilderoy Lockhart (a wizard who was famous for a number of feats he didn’t actually do. Rather, he erased the memories of the people who did impressive things and took the credit. However, he ended up erasing his own memory in book two, while attempting to erase the memories of Ron and Harry, who had discovered that he was a fake.), as well as Neville Longbottom (a classmate of theirs. He was at the hospital to visit his parents, who had been tortured into insanity by one of Voldemort’s followers. Only Harry knew about this, although he found out from Dumbledore’s, and not Neville.). This scene isn’t included in the movie adaptation.

For my project, I decided to storyboard what a movie version of the scene might look like, making some likely edits as I went (such as compressing a few scenes into one, and cutting Ginny from the scene, as the movies didn’t focus on her as much.). For each panel of the storyboard, I wrote a short blurb explaining its probable impact on the movie, and the series as a whole. I displayed my full storyboard, in the form of a poster, at the exhibition.

Speaking of the exhibition, I worked in a group of students with similarly themed projects to mine to turn a section of the library into Dumbledore’s office. This included covering some bookshelves with black paper and fairy lights, setting up iPads with paper “picture frames” so they looked like moving portraits, placing bowls of candy out for the exhibition attendees to eat, and also setting up “butterbeer pong”. The basic concept of butterbeer pong is throwing ping-pong balls through “quidditch hoops” (made of badminton rackets) into a triangle of red solo cups.

All in all, I thought the exhibition went well. I meandered away from my own project long enough to look at other people’s projects (which were generally excellent), check out the grade eight exhibition (which was good but had a much less exciting topic than ours) and the grade eleven exhibiton (which was pretty amazing, especially considering that they had less time than us). However, I do think my project would have been better suited to a different style of presentation, as it wasn’t as visually interesting or attention-catching as it could have been.

Toodles.