A group of students hopes to raise £40,000 via crowdfunding to create the first UK fan film based on JK Rowling’s Harry Potter stories, reports the BBC.
Mudblood and the Book of Spells will focus on a muggle-born wizard who is expelled from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for retaliating against bullies. Producers have shot a promotional trailer, and hope to start filming in the new year.
Manchester film student Cameron Cairnduff will direct the 30-minute not-for-profit film, which stars Bretten Lord in the lead role of Charlie and has also recruited Game of Thrones actor Forbes KB to play an unspecified part. The film-makers started a one-month campaign on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter in a bid to raise the movie’s £40,000. At the time of publication they had secured £2,649 from 66 backers. There are 19 days left to donate.
“We want to make something people will want to watch and we want to create our own [job] opportunities,” Cairnduff told the BBC. “There are no good Harry Potter fan films – they’re all American, and have low production values.”
Warner Bros, the studio behind the Harry Potter films, has its own big-budget followup planned to the highest-grossing film saga of all time, the JK Rowling-penned Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. However, fan films usually fly under the radar with entertainment lawyers due to their low-budget, not-for-profit nature.
A synopsis for Mudblood and the Book of Spells reads: “We join Charlie, a young muggle-born wizard, as he embarks on an adventure that will change him forever. After being unfairly condemned and imprisoned by the Ministry for crimes he did not commit, Charlie taps into a power deep inside himself and manages to break free. Now a fugitive, he is befriended by a band of unseemly Wizards who need his help to recover an artefact so ancient and powerful it will bring the Wizarding World to its knees.”
The fan film is being shot with the help of students from Futureworks School of Media in Salford, which Cairnduff attends, as well as volunteers from other local universities and the Royal Northern College of Music. The screenplay has been written with input from users of the fan sites Pottermore and MuggleNet. The aim is to shoot at outside locations across northern England in January, with premieres in Manchester and London by the end of 2015.
