Interview With Doggie House, Creators Of ‘Harry Potter And The Stone’ (Transcript)
Note: This is a transcript from Feature First’s full-length interview with Doggie House Productions on their new film, Harry Potter and the Stone, now available in full on YouTube. This interview was transcribed by Zanda Gubecka and conducted by Bhargav Chandramouli. Find our article on the interview here and find our full interview below.
Bhargav Chandramouli (BC): Hi, I’m here with the cast of Harry Potter and the Stone, the new fan film by Doggie House Productions. Would everyone mind going around and saying who you are?
Stephan Paterson (SP): I’m Stephan Paterson.
Cooper Atkinson (CA): I’m Cooper Atkinson.
David Snee (DS): I’m David Snee.
Tyler Motley Ellis (TME): And I’m Tyler Motley Ellis.
CA: And we’re Doggie House! Well, with others.
SP: Yeah, yeah, regrettably not everyone is here, but there’s a lot of people on our team, who you know make it possible.
TME: Though, you’re about looking at just a third of it [Doggie House] really. Such a small team.
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 just hilarious, this is pure perfection.” What gave you the idea? What gave you the idea to, like, make a parody film and really commit to all of this?
DS: I say, we’ve done a lot of different things, we’ve written albums and made art together and things. And produced plays —
CA: We do live shows.
DS: And 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, and we can do it and 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. And then, I’d say the parody aspect mostly just came from, you know, as we 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. Really, we could make it happen because we had our group of friends with so many varied talents.
BC: Did you guys all meet in college? Or is this not a college project? My assumption was that you did this through college or something.
CA: Oh man, I’ll say that I’ve known a couple of people for like 15 years, but a lot of us met in high school, I think is the way to put it. Most of us met in high school and sort of by chance, sort of not by chance, ended up going to the same college. But none of us did film in college. And it wasn’t really a college project in terms of a thesis or something official as part of our schooling. It was more so that we were all holding down jobs, completing unrelated college degrees, and then making a film together in the free time.
SP: There were a lot of times where everyone was getting off of work, classes, rehearsals, like at eleven o’clock at night and we were like “Alright, it’s time to start filming!”
CA: We didn’t sleep much. There was not a lot of sleep.
SP: It was a little bit of an issue.
BC: That’s the life!
CA: Exactly, exactly.
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’re 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 through there, 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 the 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 the film basically.
CA: And that night we did the train set with the the Ron and Hermione scene, where they’re getting inside of the train, which is in our living room. Some people have interestingly
not known where that shot [was shot] even though a lot of it was shot in our living room.
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.
BC: Are any of you really passionate about film or like the production process of film? Or was it just something you just wanted to do because you’re all creative and artistic?
CA: It was almost a joke that we did a movie, and did this movie, and did a movie that was so challenging and long, you know? It had so much to it like we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into and it’s embarrassing to say originally when we started our plan
was to do all of this work in two weeks. Because, you know, we are other artists, we had other things we wanted to do. So we said to ourselves let’s bang this out in two weeks and not worry about it too much, just keep going, keep shooting, keep editing and it’ll be done. Then we’ll just move on to the next thing and it took three years because we had no idea what we were doing.
DS: And as an example of that, I mean Tyler you could talk more about this, we started working on the movie and shortly into it we thought “Oh yeah we need someone to do
the music. Our friend Tyler knows something about music let’s ask him!”
CA: That’s how you [Tyler Motley Ellis] really got into Doggie House too.
TME: That’s true, I sort of knew people in high school, but I really met you guys in college. I just walked in when Doggie House became Doggie House. I just knew there was something really special there with the creative atmosphere I really wanted to be around. I took a some time off of college and then came back. And then a few trips into Doggie House, when I was back, started this Harry Potter thing. I wasn’t there when it started but I was there, I walk in, and Joe just casually from the other room says “You want to do the music for this?” I go “Oh yeah sure and then I tried out how many cues there are in the following nights and which [cues] ones are awful and which ones are easy. I started with the title card music. So when you see Harry Potter and the Stone, that was the first queue I did. I was like “Alright, I think this could work.” Then three years later I got it all done.
BC: The music was fantastic and also the sound levels too. It’s funny that you mentioned the Harry Potter and the Stone title card because that part, it reminded me of the movie, because the volume goes really loud in the movie randomly. I was watching with my friend he was like “Is the sound level like weird?” and I’m like “No.” I think this is in the original movie as well.” Just the little details like that really amped up the entire movie and it’s the commitment to the details that are just so impressive.
CA: I mean we’ve watched the movie hundreds,
SP: Maybe thousands
DS: Collectively, I think thousands
CA: We’d shoot the movie and watch them [the scenes] as we’d prepare to shoot a scene. We’d watch it a ton of times, and we’d note everything that we need to go through. And then as we’re filming it, we’re referencing the movie and making sure that all the little details that we could find in a shot are sort of there and being represented in the right way. And then as Tyler’s doing music you just watch the movie, just, over and over and over. You listen to one-second increments of the movie over and over. In order to make it shot for shot, like frame for frame, you have to watch it hundreds of times. It is fun that there is so much matching detail but it’s almost like a necessity of doing a shot-for-shot.
DS: I think a good example of that is all background extras and nameless background characters. A lot of them have really fun little stuff going on that just sort of happened when we were filming and we’ve loved people in the comments noticing it. The reason all that comes about is because we’re sitting there watching the shot and going “Okay someone’s sitting right there, what are they doing?” I have to match it and recreate it, whatever they happen to be doing and just doing that a hundred times in a row for all the extras in The Great Hall or something like that.
CA: And the original movie is so rich with strange little things happening all over the place and that gives us a lot to start with and say “Oh that’s a funny little thing that we just noticed after our 800th time watching it, let’s take that and expound on it in some way and sort of make it our own joke.” And again, like you (David Snee) just said, if we’re doing like a miniature shot let’s take the Platform 9 2⁄4 for an example. We shoot a miniature shot, right? And then we have to separately record each person, every extra as well as main characters that are in the shot. We have to put them on a green screen and when you are having to do that for even extras, you start to have fun with what the extras are doing because we’re trying to keep ourselves entertained and we’re trying to make the movie fun too. So it just sort of happens a lot that there is a lot of stuff to notice in the background and little inside jokes of ours that it’s amazing people have figured out. I think one of the most amazing things people figured out is Fred and George on the Platform are wearing these buttless pants, that have the pockets cut out. And someone noticed that we reused the pockets that we cut out of those pants as Fluffy’s ears that we put in Beck’s hat and only we would know that, only we thought that that was funny in a little Easter egg for us and someone noticed it within four days of it being out. It’s just amazing to us that people are paying attention. We didn’t expect that at all, but the best part of the reception of it is that people have been picking up the det ails and loving the details because we just really didn’t think that they would be for anyone else but us. So that’s been really really special since it’s come out.
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 we’re 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 honor 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.
SP: Just a lot of love, honestly between all of the friends who worked on it. Just
the energy with this, Doggie House, in general, is just like very strong, and it’s just fun. It’s an energy unlike another really.
DS: Which is why we already decided to make something else, because we want to keep doing it.
BC: That’s great, I mean I love film, I really wanted to make movies one day, so I understand the passion. It’s such a loving environment to produce something, just create art, and, you know, it’s really great.
DS: Don’t get us wrong there were stressful parts about it too, but what makes it all worth it
is working through that stressful stuff together, and knowing that our friendship was more important than whatever movie thing we were getting stressed about, and keeping that alive. And I think that’s what ends up making the movie so fun, is that whenever we hit a hurdle or
hit a wall on some obstacle and working on it, we were most concerned with how can we still have fun doing this as people together and worry less about how the movie is going to end up and worry more about that [friendship]. Just by doing that, the product ended up better than we could have thought and could have hoped honestly.
CA: We took breaks when it was necessary. And there were a lot of points in which we needed to push through and did push through even when it was really sort of a big mental
challenge to push through. But that didn’t mean that we always brutally pushed ourselves through. We definitely did other things in the process. We had our long hiatuses during
production and just kept coming back to it just because we like making art and we had come so far. It was just a lot of fun together
BC: So glad that this movie came to fruition at the end of the day. I got to ask though, what gave you guys the idea originally? Because I know Stephan is just a fantastic Harry Potter, that was one of the first things that came to mind when watching the movie, I was like “Wow, the actor playing Harry Potter, there’s probably just not a better casting for him.” But also the house, the Dursley’s house it’s literally the same place. Where? What? How did you find that?
CA: Well I’ll take this one. So we’re named Doggie House because of that house. During college, four or five of us rented that house having already been friends and we lived in that house as roommates. It’s this very dinky little, kind of crappy house in Greensboro, North Carolina, next to our schools, our colleges, and we just lived there. It was just the house that we rented and was just a very bad house.
DS: It was dinky but we had it all to ourselves. We had free run of the place, there weren’t any other apartments in the house with us and so that helped a lot, having the whole place to ourselves made it so that we could film whenever we wanted.
SP: And we did happen to have a room underneath the stairs, which I lived in, so a natural
Harry Potter.
CA: I think way back when Doggie House started so we started Harry Potter in late 2021 but we moved into Doggie House, that house, around mid-2020 and one of the first things we noted was well who gets toom and the stairs even look the same, so I think it was always sort of
in the back of our heads. It is not the reason we made the movie or even picked that movie. It did definitely play into it and it made us think of the movie more in some senses but it is a
really fun coincidence that you lived in that room and you were the perfect pick for Harry Potter. As I was saying only a few of us started living in that house but then
the twelve of us who make up the group also lived around town. But we all
spent all of our time in this little house. That is Doggie House.
TME: I did not live there… but I lived there.
CA: We just did everything there, and most of our sets are there, and our name comes
from that house, and we’re no longer at that house anymore as of recent. But
it will sort of forever be our name.
BC: What a beautiful team. I did have one question from my team, they asked “how did you guys stay motivated throughout it?” Throughout the process.
SP: Well, so I think we were touching on those stressors that happen throughout film and those don’t just go away just because you’re having fun with something. But I think we did really put an emphasis on keeping the energy as a group and like we said, we took breaks and things. I think in the middle of it, at one point, we decided that let’s just do something else and we made a play in one day I think. A musical in one day, yeah. So just doing things to reinspire ourselves and remind ourselves why it is we do this with each other. I think just having an appreciation for every single person working on the project, like no one is better than anyone [else] in the project you know everyone is putting their everything into the film. And so just like, really keeping that energy of “We’re in this
together, we’re all with this ship.”
DS: I think for me, the best example is that I started working on all the sound effects in the entire movie maybe four, three and a half months before the movie came out. Like, we basically had not done any sound effects work before that point and I didn’t know that I was going to do sound effects but someone had to do them so I sat down and went “I guess I’ll start, I’ll contribute to it,” but what kept me going through that was less the idea that I was yeah that I was doing it like for myself or anything like that and more that I was doing it for other people. Either I was doing it so they wouldn’t have to do it or I was doing it to enhance their work, right, because sound really enhances the visuals of the movie so
Much. There was a lot of editing that Cooper did where I would watch the scene that he had put together in editing and get really inspired by how good his stuff was. And then go I really need to make sure that my sound effects are like good enough to sit alongside of [the visuals] as I was working.
SP: Yeah, everyone put so much work into this film that it sort of necessitated making sure that every piece of the film really highlights how beautiful everything that everyone did was. The editing, the music, the sound, the acting, right? It’s like each of these things were sort of pushed a level higher because everyone thought like “Oh this is good, well I can’t let them down,” and let their acting fall short because this element isn’t working or let the music fall short because the sound isn’t right. So it really was just trying to respect and give the best pedestal to everyone’s art in the film.
CA: I think that for any group artistic endeavor, especially on a film set, being close with each other is a must to push through limitations such as budget and motivation and stuff like that. You want to always want to work for each other and with each other, you want to work through challenges together. If it becomes really individualistic, you don’t feel the need to anymore because you get burned out and there are a lot of inflection points during making a movie that we felt and anyone feels of you start to feel burned out because it’s just a ton of work when you’re making any two and a half hour movie. Especially one with just so many effects and music and all the bells and whistles that are in it. There’s really so much work. But like we’ve said you find other things to do with each other, you find ways to to do it for other people and yourself and you just remember that it’s a group experience, and something that you’re doing together. I think that was really all the motivation that we needed. And I could say personally, I wanted to be a solo musician when I was a kid and I always ran into the problem of I could get so far, but at certain point, I would get burned out and then I’m only making it for myself and when I’m not having fun anymore, then I’m just sort of done. So having the group around you that wants to make it fun for you, you get burned out and then someone comes over and makes a joke and tries to lift you up. You need your friends and you need people you like working with in order for that to happen. And I think that was really the motivation that pushed us through and made us want to do it for each other.
TME: It was especially present at the beginning because filming everything took eight months and then it was two years to complete post, and everything else, and that’s some of
my favourite memories on the project. Just like some nights you know I got to play Draco, which was not going to happen at first and I’m glad it did because I got to go to all these um nights. I love the Forbidden Forest scene, that was my favourite night filming because there were so many of us there. There was a lot to do and it’s that same thing of us supporting each other, keeping the momentum and everything. Those will always be my favorite of course. Then we had years of a lot of work that had to be more independent, just because of specific task and stuff that some people were already equipped for but then others were learning along the way. Kind of like what Cooper was saying, there’s a lot of work ahead of me where I want to do solo artistic work. And now just after this project I’m like “Well, I really got to make sure it’s not only that” because that is going to be kind of boring and it comes with pros and cons but I’m just so excited for what’s next for Doggie House.
BC: For each one of you then, what do you think this production helped you with, to understand what you want to do in the future with your art?
SP: So one of the things that I became somewhat interested in and want to sort of delve
into more was, because we had no pre-production, our schedules were very all over the place and so I’m sort of becoming interested in production planning and production schedules which sounds very type A. Which I don’t feel like I am but something about that I was like “Oh, it just feels nice to like pull all these things together and plan everything and sort of have everything go out,” and that sort of thing. But really, I just like getting my hands on a project whatever it might be.
DS: Four of us did theater in high school, it’s part of how we met in high school, so the three of us and our friend Jackie Hines. Since we all did theater in high school that’s definitely part of our background. I went to UNCG and I got a BFA in acting so that’s most of my background and that’s what I want to go into in the future. But I think
learning about and learning how to how to do all the other stuff in the movie other than just acting has been really really fun for me and I think it’s definitely opened up things that I think, “Yeah! I could do that, I could do Foley again for something else if someone hired me to,” you know things like that.
CA: Yeah, my background, as you [Daniel] just said was acting throughout a lot of middle school, a lot of my childhood, and then also music, specifically like music production. As we said we came into this movie having already sort of started being an art collective together who wants to approach different artistic endeavors and different things like albums and movies and just any sort of thing. We all sort of have that background of wanting to just try out different artistic things but I think for me in particular, it was mainly acting and music that I had a background with. And throughout doing this project, I sort of re-fell in love with you know making movies again which was something from very early on in my childhood that I did but throughout most of my adolescence really didn’t think I’d have any sort of interest in. But, sort of greater than that I think is just I started valuing working with other people and people that I felt close with and worked well with just in any artistic endeavor. I just
want to be someone who sets up artistic spaces who starts production teams and
companies who, you know, works across different fields and just sort of gets projects going and enjoys every step of the process and working with people. I think that’s what I fell more in love with in doing this movie.
TME: For me, music has kind of always been my thing. It even got me into theater, so I had a little bit of that background too before this, which was great, and I just always had a background of learning a lot of music by ear. So that was a fortunate thing to have experience in before this. For years I’ve been trying to build up the courage to write, to be a composer for several mediums now that that’s stretching out to musical theatre, but also, of course, still film. And I feel like this gave me the confidence to go and do that a lot.
SP: Main other things I wanted to say really was just to like shout out by name some of the other people in our production. We’ve already talked about Jackie Hines quite a few times, she’s an incredible actor and is going to constantly be doing a lot of work. As well as Lea Chicosky, who played our Hagrid.
BC: Oh she was fantastic yeah.
CA: We have less than a minute.
SP: Less than- oh my gosh. Beck [Kelly], who played all of the monsters, is an incredible writer and wants to you know like go into writing for scripts and all those
sorts of things. Joe Nottestad did amazing with editing and some of our tech work.
CA: Joe played Professor McGonagall and Snape and a lot of the other professors. Amanda [Walton] did a lot of our animation.
SP: And acting as well. Juno Nielson was our Squirrel.
DS: Professor Squirrel
SP: and Mr Dursley.
CA: Well, you can find us on YouTube @ItsDoggieHouse, our channel is just
called Doggie House, or you could follow us on our socials @ItsDoggieHouse on Twitter and Instagram.
SP: We’ll keep that updated you’ll maybe see what we’re working on next.
BC: I’m so glad I got to meet you guys. Fantastic film, congratulations on releasing it, you guys are amazing and I’m so happy to to meet you guys and so excited for your next film!
