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The Sorcerers of Stagecraft

Finally, as the posters proclaim, “It All Ends.” Not just the eight-part cinematic saga of Harry Potter (with his Chamber of Secrets, his Goblet of Fire, his Deathly Hallows and so on) but also a decade’s worth of craftsmanship for those toiling off-camera: the ones who clothed the Hogwarters, wrangled the owls, built the snitch, tweaked the goblins and crafted the wands — around 600 wands in all, including backups, duplicates and those made specially for fighting.

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The snitch, which must be captured as part of a game of Quidditch.Credit...Photograph by Levon Biss for The New York Times

These are people like the stunt coordinator Greg Powell, who spent the last decade being attacked by those wands. “When it came to stunts, there were hundreds of what we call ‘jerk-backs,’ ” he says. “When a spell hits, you get jerked back — thrown against a wall, across a floor, over a table. So I had to think, How do you fight with a wand? What does a wand fight look like?”

Julie Tottman, the head animal trainer, spent the decade escorting cats, reptiles, bats, armadillos, baby ostriches, ferrets, ravens, a kookaburra, a pygmy hippo, a dog named Monkey and the owls, the most famous of which is Hedwig, who actually gets fan mail. “We always sent them a feather back,” she says.

The Sorcerers of Stagecraft

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Photograph by Levon Biss for The New York Times

Barry Wilkinson, the property master, bore responsibility for Harry’s iconic spectacles. “They only slightly changed in size over the years,” he deadpans. And the special-makeup-effects artist Nick Dudman ran through roughly three and a half metric tons of prosthetic silicone in the last Potter film alone. “The Gringotts goblins in the first film are Dickensian, more like caricatures, which served that film well. In the last few films they had to feel real. Even if they were goblins.”

The costume designer Jany Temime is a relative newcomer (she came aboard for the third film) who was charged with designing a wardrobe for pure evil. “Voldemort was a pain,” she says. “I always thought he was more of an idea — a floating element. So I used silk for him, but different weights of fabric. That’s how you capture the movement of evil.” Temime still has her first Warner Brothers security pass from 2003, “so I always have the image of someone young to remind me how I was,” she says with a laugh.

For these backstage wizards, the end is predictably bittersweet. “When I was young, I was sad when I left school, because I’d had so much fun,” Dudman says. “Well, I’ve been at Hogwarts twice as long as any other school on my C.V.”

BACKSTAGE WIZARDS: An extended slideshow of the magicians behind the movies is at nytimes.com /magazine.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 30 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Sorcerers of Stagecraft. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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