Harry Potter Film Wizardry Review and Giveaway

‘Tis the season for giving; and since HarperCollins has furnished us with no less than five copies of Harry Potter: Film Wizardry, their retrospective viewbook on 6/7ths of the Harry Potter movies; we’ll be passing them along to you.  If you can gives us a sentence on why you should teach Defense of the Dark Arts, you might be getting a really beautiful book, that is full of other, smaller, beautiful books.

More details after the jump.

The Book

The book is, in a word, gorgeous, even to this casual fan.  The glossy pages are covered in photos of sets, actors, props, actual callsheets and other documentation, continuity photos, and concept art; and the text, squeezed here and there among visuals, contains interviews with castmembers, prop artists, makeup and costume designers, and pretty much anyone else who might have had a hand in bringing Harry Potter to the screen.

But the coolest thing about it is that it’s essentially a very grownup geeky popup book.  Strewn through the pages are various envelopes and booklets that are attached at one seam to the paper.  Each of them is a prop replica of some paper object from the movies, including: Harry’s first Hogwarts letter, adressed to the cupboard; a set of stickers to label home-made potions; paper boxes of Honeydukes candy (sans candy); a program from the Quidditch World Cup; an invitation to the Yule Ball; a Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes product catalog; and, last but not least, the Marauder’s Map.  The book’s collage-like format is so convincing that I actually started running my hands over each page, just to make sure I wasn’t missing an insert among the printed photos.

The only downside with its quite exhaustive visual presentation of the movies is that it’s not quite complete: there’s still a 7th film to come, which is acknowledged in the book’s last two pages where readers get a sneak peek at Gringotts Bank and the Room of Requirement as they will appear in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.

The Contest

So, how do you get your own copy of the book?  Well, you could go out and buy one.  But if you want to get one of our five copies, what you’ve got to do is leave us a comment on the post in our Facebook feed, or in this post itself, and tell us, in a sentence, why the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry should hire you to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts.  We’ll keep the contest open until for two weeks, so just make sure you do it by January 3rd.  The five most convincing comments will get their five most excellent prizes.

May the best prospective Professor Win!