The heavy, iron-wrought gates of Leavesden Studios were practically buckling under the weight of the crowd.
It was raining—a miserable, relentless English drizzle—but it hadn't deterred the paparazzi. Hundreds of photographers, tabloid reporters, and overly aggressive fans were pressed against the chain-link perimeter fences, their camera lenses shoved through the gaps like rifle barrels. The second Daniel's black Range Rover pulled off the main road and approached the checkpoint, the flashbulbs erupted into a blinding, strobe-like frenzy.
They were screaming his name, screaming the kids' names, desperate for a soundbite or a clear shot through the tinted glass.
Daniel barely glanced at them. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, waiting for the gates to open.
Flanking the entrance were a dozen contractors from Apex. They weren't standard studio security guards in cheap windbreakers. They were built like brick walls, wearing heavy tactical gear and standing in the freezing rain with absolute, intimidating stillness. When one of the paparazzi tried to climb the lower rung of the fence to get a better angle at the SUV, an Apex contractor simply stepped forward, grabbed the man by the collar of his expensive waterproof jacket, and tossed him back into the mud with zero hesitation.
The gates hummed open. Daniel drove through.
The moment the heavy steel clanged shut behind his car, the chaos of the outside world completely evaporated. The lot was a massive, organized bubble. Forklifts were moving pallets of lighting gear, grips were pushing carts of heavy cables, and production assistants were speed-walking between the trailers with walkie-talkies pressed to their ears.
Daniel parked in his reserved spot near Hangar A, killed the engine, and stepped out into the damp morning air.
He had spent the last two weeks out on location. They had completely locked down a quiet suburban street in Berkshire to shoot the Privet Drive sequences, dodging the rain and dealing with angry locals. Then they had taken over a platform at King's Cross Station in London for three frantic nights, moving hundreds of extras and a literal steam train into place between the hours of midnight and 5 AM.
The location shoots were exhausting, fast-paced, and wildly unpredictable. But today was different. Today, they were finally moving inside the controlled environment of Dante Ferretti's massive sets.
Daniel walked past the catering tents, grabbing a black coffee in a paper cup, and headed straight for the hair and makeup trailers.
He knocked twice on the thin aluminum door of Trailer 2 and pushed it open.
The smell of aerosol hairspray and hot styling iron hit him instantly.
"I look like a right poodle, yeah?" Emma complained loudly, staring at her reflection in the brightly lit vanity mirror. "It's bare sticky. Like wearing a helmet."
A frustrated makeup artist was trying to tease the eleven-year-old's hair into the iconic, bushy, unmanageable mane.
"It's supposed to be bushy, Em," Rupert laughed from the small sofa in the corner. He was already fully dressed in his Hogwarts robes, though his tie was completely askew and his collar was half tucked in.
"Shut up, you," Emma shot back, swatting at him without turning around. "Your hair looks like a rusty Brillo pad."
Rupert grinned, completely unbothered. He patted the side of his oversized, black wizard's robe. "I don't care about the hair, mate. These robes are mint. The pockets are massive. I got a whole packet of Quavers and a Twix in here. The wardrobe lady didn't even notice."
"Don't let wardrobe catch you melting chocolate on the lining," Daniel warned as he walked in, taking a sip of his coffee.
"Morning, Dan," Rupert said, pulling a crisp out of his pocket and tossing it into his mouth.
"Morning," Daniel smiled. "Where's Colin?"
"Back there," Emma pointed a thumb over her shoulder toward the partitioned dressing area in the back of the trailer. "Hasn't said a word in like ten minutes. Think he's nervous."
Daniel walked past the vanity stations and pushed the curtain aside.
Colin was standing in front of a full-length mirror. He was wearing the oversized, slightly faded robes that belonged to Harry, but what had him completely frozen was his face. The makeup team had just applied the thin, jagged lightning bolt scar to his forehead, and he was wearing the round, wire-rimmed glasses.
He just stared at his reflection, completely motionless. The weight of the character was hitting him all at once. He didn't look like a skinny kid from Northern Ireland anymore. He looked like the Boy Who Lived.
Daniel walked up and stood next to him, looking at their reflections in the mirror.
"Glasses fit okay?" Daniel asked casually.
Colin blinked, snapping out of his trance. He looked up at Daniel. "What?"
"The glasses," Daniel repeated, pointing at the wire rims. "Prop department usually makes them too tight. If they're pinching the bridge of your nose, tell the makeup girls to bend the frames out a bit. Otherwise, you're gonna have a massive headache by lunchtime."
Colin reached up, lightly touching the frames. "Nah, they're... they're alright. A bit weird seeing it, though. The scar and all."
"Yeah, well, try not to scratch at it," Daniel said, clapping the kid on the shoulder. "Takes them forty minutes to glue the prosthetic back on if you peel it off. Come on, get your shoes tied. We're on set in twenty."
Colin nodded, his shoulders dropping a couple of inches as the heavy, overwhelming anxiety drained out of him. He grabbed his trainers. "Right. Dead on."
Daniel left the kids to finish getting ready and stepped back out into the light drizzle.
Tom Wiley was waiting for him at the bottom of the trailer stairs, holding a thick script binder to his chest to keep the rain off the pages. Standing next to Tom was Joanne.
She looked entirely out of her element, wearing a neat trench coat and holding an umbrella.
Daniel had personally invited her to the set today. She had absolutely zero creative control over the film production, no legal rights to interfere with the casting, and no say in how the sets were built. Daniel owned the intellectual property entirely. He was the architect; she was the writer who had fleshed out his massive, meticulous skeletons. But she had spent the last few years living in these worlds on a computer screen, and Daniel wanted her to see what they had physically built.
"Daniel," Joanne smiled, though her eyes were darting around the massive, chaotic studio lot in awe.
"Glad you could make it, Jo," Daniel said, shaking her hand. "How was the drive up?"
"Fine, perfectly fine," she said, looking toward the massive Hangar A. "Is it really as big as the blueprints you showed me?"
"Bigger," Daniel promised. "Dante outdid himself."
"I just wanted to say thank you for bringing me out," Joanne said earnestly. "Seeing it all... it's surreal. I know I just wrote the pages, but seeing it come alive like this..."
"You put the muscle on the bones, Jo," Daniel said graciously. "You earned a front-row seat. Let's go to my trailer and run through the day's pages before we get on the floor."
They walked over to Daniel's massive double-wide production trailer. It was warm inside, smelling faintly of coffee and printed paper. Daniel sat down at the small conference table, opening his script binder. Tom and Joanne sat across from him.
"Alright," Daniel said, flipping to the scenes they were shooting today in the Great Hall. "We're doing the Sorting sequence, and then the first feast. Mostly establishing shots, getting the kids' reactions, and Maggie's introductory dialogue."
Tom leaned forward, tapping his pen on a specific page. "I was looking at Ron's dialogue when he's explaining the houses to Harry and Hermione at the table. Are we sure we don't want to punch up the comedy a bit? Give him a bit more of a goofy reaction when the ghosts fly in?"
"No," Daniel said firmly.
He had spent months meticulously tweaking this script. In the original universe that Daniel remembered, the movies had slowly assassinated Ron Weasley's character, stripping away his intelligence and tactical mind just to give his best lines to Hermione. They had turned him into a bumbling, terrified comic relief sidekick.
Daniel had fixed that massive plot hole when he plotted the novels for Joanne to write in this world.
"We are sticking faithfully to the books we published," Daniel reminded Tom. "Ron grew up in the wizarding world. Hermione is brilliant, but she's muggle-born. She only knows what she read in Hogwarts: A History. Harry doesn't know anything. Ron is their actual guide. He knows the politics, he knows the dark families, he knows how the magic actually works in practice, not just in theory."
Joanne nodded in complete agreement. "Exactly. In the books we wrote, Ron is the strategist. He plays chess. He shouldn't be screaming at the ghosts; he grew up with a ghoul in his attic."
"Exactly," Daniel said, circling a block of dialogue on his script. "Keep the dialogue grounded. Let Rupert play him as the street-smart kid who knows the ropes. When Hermione starts reciting facts from a textbook, Ron is the one who explains how the wizarding world actually operates. We don't make him the punchline."
"Got it," Tom nodded, crossing out his own margin notes. "I'll let Rupert know to play it straight."
A sharp knock echoed on the trailer door. The First Assistant Director stuck his head in.
"Dan, cameras are up. Dante says the hall is ready for you."
"Let's go make a movie," Daniel said, standing up.
When they walked into Hangar A, Joanne actually stopped walking. She lowered her umbrella, her mouth dropping open slightly.
The hangar was massive, but Dante Ferretti had completely transformed the interior. The Great Hall wasn't a bunch of green screens and plywood walls. It was intensely, breathtakingly physical.
The floors were laid with thick, heavy slabs of real York stone, giving the room a freezing, ancient chill. Four massive, solid oak tables stretched the entire length of the room, polished and set with hundreds of golden plates and goblets. At the head of the room sat the High Table, backed by a massive practical fireplace that was actually burning, throwing a warm, flickering orange light across the stone.
Above them, the ceiling was a massive grid of green fabric dotted with thousands of silver tracking markers. The VFX department would handle the floating candles and the enchanted night sky in post-production. The CGI technology Daniel had access to in 2029 was phenomenal, and it was the perfect tool to handle the impossible magic. But down here on the ground, where the actors actually lived and breathed, everything they touched was real.
The room was buzzing with three hundred child extras, all wearing crisp new robes, sitting at the tables and chattering excitedly.
Daniel walked through the center aisle, feeling the satisfying, heavy clack of his boots echoing off the real stone. Dante was standing near the camera monitors, looking incredibly proud of himself.
"It's perfect, Dante," Daniel told the production designer as he walked past.
"Of course it is," Dante smiled, waving him off.
Daniel took his spot in the director's chair behind the main camera monitors. Tom sat next to him with his headset on.
"Bring in the first years," Daniel called out over his microphone.
The heavy wooden doors at the back of the hall were pulled shut. The massive camera crane swept down, getting into position to track the kids as they walked in.
"Quiet on set!" the First AD bellowed.
The three hundred extras instantly went dead silent. The only sound in the massive room was the crackling of the practical fire behind the High Table.
"Roll sound," Daniel said.
"Sound speeds."
"Cameras."
"Rolling."
Daniel watched the monitors. "Action."
The heavy wooden doors creaked open.
Colin, Emma, and Rupert walked into the Great Hall, leading a group of about twenty other extras.
They hadn't seen the set yet. Daniel had specifically kept them out of Hangar A all morning just to get this exact reaction.
As the kids stepped onto the heavy York stone, the sound of their footsteps echoed loudly through the cavernous room. They looked up, their eyes going wide as they took in the massive oak tables, the golden plates, the older students staring at them, and the huge, flickering fireplace at the end.
They didn't have to act. The sheer scale of the production completely overwhelmed them. Emma wasn't trying to look smart; she was genuinely gaping at the high walls. Rupert forgot about his pocket full of snacks, his jaw practically hitting the floor. Colin looked around the room with an expression of pure, unadulterated wonder, exactly the way a kid who grew up in a cupboard would look if he walked into a castle.
The camera tracked them beautifully as they walked down the center aisle.
Waiting for them at the steps of the High Table was Maggie Smith.
She stood perfectly straight, wearing deep emerald robes, holding a long scroll of parchment. She didn't look like an actress. She exuded a terrifying, aristocratic authority that immediately commanded the room.
As the kids approached, Maggie looked down at them over the rim of her spectacles.
"Welcome to Hogwarts," Maggie delivered her line. Her voice wasn't loud, but it carried perfectly across the stone room, crisp and incredibly sharp. "Shortly, you will pass through these doors and join your classmates. But before you can take your seats, you must be sorted into your houses."
The silence in the room was absolute. Three hundred kids were practically holding their breath.
Daniel watched the monitor, a slow smile spreading across his face. The lighting was gorgeous, the physical set was grounding the entire scene, and Maggie was absolute perfection.
"Cut!" Daniel called out.
The tension broke. The kids exhaled loudly.
"Brilliant," Daniel said into the mic. "Reset to one. Let's get coverage on Maggie, and then we move to the hat."
For the next twelve hours, they shot. It was grueling, repetitive work, moving heavy camera rigs, managing hundreds of children who were getting tired and hungry, and shooting the same dialogue from five different angles. But Daniel navigated it like a machine. He kept the energy up, joked with the kids when they flubbed lines, and let the veteran actors completely own their space.
By ten o'clock that night, the hangar was finally empty.
The extras had been bussed home, the trio was back at their respective hotels with their parents, and the massive practical fires had been extinguished.
Daniel sat in the dark, cramped editing bay tucked into one of the temporary office trailers. Tom was sitting next to him, nursing a lukewarm beer he had scavenged from someone's fridge.
On the massive color-calibrated monitors in front of them, the editor was running through the raw dailies of the Great Hall sequence.
They watched the footage play back.
It looked incredible. The heavy, tactile reality of Dante's set blended perfectly with the high-resolution digital cameras. But more importantly, the kids popped off the screen.
They watched a tight shot of Rupert leaning over to Colin, whispering something about his older brothers, while Emma rolled her eyes in the background. The chemistry was completely natural. They didn't look like polished Hollywood kids; they looked like real, slightly awkward eleven-year-olds dealing with a completely insane situation.
"You were right about the stone floors," Tom muttered, taking a sip of his beer. "The way they walk... they aren't shuffling. They look small in that room. It works."
"It grounds them," Daniel agreed, his eyes locked on the screen. "You can have the best CGI sky in the world, but if the floor looks fake, the audience checks out in ten seconds."
Tom shook his head, staring at the monitor as Maggie Smith delivered her lines again. "This is going to be massive, Dan. We all knew the books were huge, but seeing the footage... it's a different beast."
Daniel's phone buzzed aggressively against the console desk.
He picked it up. It was Marcus Blackwood.
"Still awake, Marcus?" Daniel asked, leaning back in his chair. Due to the time difference, it was mid-afternoon in Los Angeles.
"Barely," Marcus said. "Just calling with your daily dose of good news. Vice City crossed the five hundred and fifty million mark globally today. It's only been out for two weeks. The legs on this movie are insane. It's drawing repeat viewings like crazy."
"Keep pushing the marketing in the European markets," Daniel said. "Don't let off the gas."
"Way ahead of you," Marcus replied. "Also, I just forwarded an email to your secure server. Rowan and the team over at Miller Interactive sent their first major update."
Daniel sat up slightly, instantly intrigued. "What is it?"
"It's a grey-box physics render," Marcus explained, his voice laced with disbelief. "They don't have the high-res textures loaded in yet, so the whole city just looks like grey blocks, but... Dan, the mechanics. Rowan's team built a driving model that actually accounts for weight distribution and tire traction. And the AI pathing? They showed a clip of an NPC getting bumped by a car, getting mad, and starting a fistfight with the driver. None of it was scripted. The engine just generated it."
"They're moving fast," Daniel smiled. The gaming studio was a massive operation, employing hundreds of the best coders on the planet, and Rowan was orchestrating them perfectly.
"They're moving like they have unlimited funding and a lunatic boss," Marcus corrected him. "Which they do. If they keep this pace, the alpha build is going to be playable in five months."
"Tell Rowan I'll review the files tonight," Daniel said. "Good work, Marcus. Get some sleep."
Daniel hung up the phone.
He looked back at the editing monitors. On the left screen, the golden trio was staring up at the ceiling of the Great Hall in pure wonder. In his email inbox, a multi-million dollar video game engine was simulating a living, breathing city. And in theaters across the world, Al Pacino was violently securing a neon empire.
"Everything alright?" Tom asked, noticing the quiet smile on Daniel's face.
"Yeah," Daniel said softly, standing up from the console and grabbing his jacket. "Everything is exactly where it needs to be."
He walked out of the editing bay and into the cool, damp English night, the absolute king of his own meticulously constructed world.
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A/N: Read ahead on Patreon: patreon.com/AmaanS