Harry Potter and Sub Reality

*Day 3* I'm blogging everyday till VidCon! What is VidCon? Check it out at www.VidCon2010.com

So, my friend Helen wrote her 'Day 3' blog about Harry Potter, because a friend of hers is doing research for his masters degree in adaptation and he is using Harry Potter for his dissertation. If you would like to help him with his research, he has a survey you can fill out here.

At first I didn't think that I had much of anything to say in a blog about Harry Potter, but, again, Helen's blog reminded me of something that I can talk about. The title of Helen's blog page is, "Of course it's happening inside your head", which, if you have read Harry Potter, you would know that this is a quote from the seventh book. Actually, it's only part of a quote, the full sentence is "Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?" Now, just keep that quote in mind for a minute. I'm going to switch gears here and talk about something entirely different, but it will all come together in the end.

Last summer I helped my friends, Bill and Adam, record a music video for a song called "Sub Reality". In the music video Bill and Adam portrayed two characters, Adam's character spends most of the video chasing Bill's character and about a third of the way through the video, Bill's character reaches a dead end and has to confront the man chasing him. In this scene, the song stops playing and Bill says "this can't be real" and Adam replies, "Why not?"

Before we filmed this scene, we were discussing what we were about to do and what each of them were going to say. Bill knew that he wanted to say "this can't be real", but he did not know what Adam should say in response. So I suggested that Adam should simply say "Why not". Bill and Adam both asked me if I really thought that would be okay and why I thought so. So I said to them, "remember in the seventh Harry Potter book when Harry says, "is this real? Or has this all been happening inside my head?"?... and then Dumbledore says "of course it is happening inside your head, but why does that mean that it isn't real?" Dumbledore is basically saying "why not", so I think, if it works in Harry Potter, it will work in this music video." Anyway, I thought it would be very fitting for those words to be inspired by that particular scene from Harry Potter because the theme of the song is about not knowing what is real.

In any case, my arguement convinced them and so, when Bill exclaims "this can't be real", Adam replies "why not", and that response was inspired by Harry Potter. If you know my friends Bill and Adam and have seen the Sub Reality music video, well then, this was a little piece of backstory that I'm sure none of us has ever shared before. If you do not know my friends Bill and Adam, please check out the video below and go subscribe to my friend Bill on youtube!: www.youtube.com/doctornoise





Anyway, that's all for today. :-)