Bhargav Chandramouli sat down with Doggie House, the creators of the satirical fan film Harry Potter and the Stone.
Doggie House, a collective based in North Carolina, USA, recently premiered its first feature film Harry Potter and the Stone. An impressive shot-by-shot, frame-by-frame, satirical remake of Chris Columbus’ 2001 classic Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, complete with matching score and performances.
Feature First’s own Bhargav Chandramouli sat down with David Snee (DS), Cooper Atkinson (CA), Stephan Patterson (SP) and Tyler Motley Ellis of Doggie House and asked for some much-needed insight into this monumental fan film.
The Thought Process
BC: You know, this was a fantastic fantastic film, I’m one of the biggest Harry Potter fans in the world, like honestly like, I love Harry Potter so much and when I saw this I was like “Wow, this is like hilarious, this is just pure perfection.” What gave you the idea? What gave you the idea to make a parody film and really commit to all of this?
DS: Making a movie sort of became obvious when we liked the idea that it was really interdisciplinary when you know there’s a lot of different skills that go into it… we could all sort of learn something new from it. I had never done sound effects before and I basically did them all for the movie but it was something new to learn. I’d say the parody aspect mostly just came from, you know, as we were working on it we wanted to have fun with ourselves and make each other laugh, so we just naturally started changing lines and making other sorts of silly changes. And it spread from there across the whole movie, we kept adding them [changes] in the more we worked on it.
CA: We’re all artists, and we’re all friends, and we all work best together. And that sort of makes us a powerful group that does a lot of different art together.
SP: And we just figured we’d tackle something as large as this. That sounded exciting to us. We could make it happen because we had our group of friends with so many varied talents.
The Financial Side Of Things
BC: So how did you guys raise money for this then? So it must’ve been a long process, it’s a long film first of all, and I mean, you just put so much effort into it. So I guess, what was the budget? How did you raise that money? And how was preproduction for this process?
DS: So there was no official budget and really no preproduction. Everything we spent was out of pocket as we needed it. I think by the end of the three years it took us to make the movie, we spent about two and a half thousand dollars. We could have easily done it in less in hindsight, we just sort of, whenever it seemed to make sense we threw down what money we had and sort of pooled stuff together.
SP: Got some fancy cardboard you know…
DS: Yeah, exactly. We never raised money or anything or set up any kind of crowdfunding.
CA: We could have done it on less. Really anyone could have done it on far less than what we spent of 2500 dollars but yeah we did want the nice fancy cardboard.
SP: It was really fun having the sort of technical limitations, right?
CA: And budgetary.
SP: Yeah, we really just wanted to dive into it. We just looked at what we had and used whatever we had around us.
CA: It became a very multi-media project and that with the budget limitations of us being in college, you know, we’re trying to pay our rent and you know work jobs and go to school and make the movie sort of like we were saying and sort of the extra cash on hand was sort of a limitation that we put into it and we wanted it to look nice but we also just wanted to try out a bunch of things and didn’t mind if we had to go off on very strange avenues, such as the puppet show, when they got in the Devil’s Snare or something. That was definitely a real limitation for us of like ‘how do we get ourselves in this giant pit of vines?’, you know and we were sitting around thinking about how to do that. And someone just had the great idea of oh we just put a net over our coffee table right (which has a big hole in it) and then we throw guitar cables, which we already had a ton of because we do music in our spare time, and those are sort of the Devil’s Snare. Then we made little sock puppets and just put our hands up and it worked great. And that was a budgetary issue.
SP: So much fun!
CA: So we tried a lot of things like that and Harry Potter [and the Philosopher’s Stone] was a great movie to pick because there’s so many different environments, there’s so many different challenges,
SP: So much magic,
CA: That you’re trying to recreate with no budget or very very little budget — pocket change —that you accumulate over three years.
DS: I think speaking of the pre-production side of it, when I say there was none, I mean that when we started working on the project we were filming the first day working on it basically. We started by filming a scene. I think the first scene we worked on was the scene between Oliver Wood and Harry, and Oliver is teaching Harry how to play Quidditch. So that was like first day of working on the film basically.
SP: We learned a lot about what it takes to make a film while making it because we just sort of started right. We had no clue about everything it would take to make the film so we just started day one and we knew okay well we got to film something. So that’s where we started.
Sequel Potential
BC: Yeah that’s, yeah no that’s amazing the attention to detail is absolutely perfection and I’m so glad that people are noticing what the details are. Because of that, because of the reception and the outward response to this film, would you guys consider doing a sequel?
DS: When it comes to what’s up next, we have started pre-production for another project we can’t quite reveal or promise what that is yet, but we have started working on something else
CA: And a sequel is not off the table.
DS: A sequel is not off the table but we’ve been looking at a lot of different ideas. I mean our heads are swimming with all these options of fun things we could do next. We’ve really been kind of inspired by people being inspired by our work, we loved the comments where people have been saying like “Oh after watching this, it really made me want to get back into filming short films, I haven’t done that in so long” and we love that kind of thing because that’s our whole attitude around making art is just like, not waiting for money or time or whatever and getting together and doing it, and doing it until you’re happy with it and then putting it out. That was sort of the standard we worked on was whatever we were happy with that was the standard we worked on. We didn’t really think very much about other people or how other people were going to interpret things
CA: Really it’s it’s an honour as an artist, when you are recognized by the public for your work, but we certainly did not make it pursuing that. We made it for each other and because we’re artists who like to make art together and we considered ourselves happy when we finished it. That was all the accomplishment and inner recognition that we needed and then it was a joy to share it with each other and have it for the rest of our lives.
Harry Potter and the Stone was developed entirely by Doggie House. The film stars and was worked on by Stephan Patterson, Cooper Atkinson, David Snee, Tyler Motley Ellis, Jackie Hines, Beck Kelly, Lea Chicosky, Joe Nottestad, Juno Nielson and Amanda Walton as well as others. The movie is streaming entirely on YouTube, with downloads available via the Doggie House Patreon. You can find Doggie House’s socials below.
Thanks for reading this interview, stay tuned for more! Read the interview transcript here.
