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MAKING OF

6 months

1000+ Screengrabs

400+ Photos & plans

1500 hrs. in Photoshop

    The Marauder's Map is, without a doubt, one of the most fascinating magical objects that populate the Harry Potter universe. If you want to learn more about how the 'Ultimate Edition' came to life, check out the videos below.

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You will learn about how it all started, the challenges I faced, and why I split the map into 3 different versions!

Marauder's Map Ultimate Edition

PART 1

How it all started

PART 2

Recreating Hogwarts

PART 3

Inside the castle

PART 4

Assembly Guide

Marauder's Map: Why 3 versions?

    One of the most obvious things people do before working on a large project is think things through. I skipped that part, and I learned my lesson the hard way. After 6 months of hard work, I printed my Marauder's map and realized it was too big.

 

As I glued on the pages to form each layer, I realized my map was very thick. It looked absolutely ridiculous. I couldn't leave it like that because it would have been too difficult to play with, or put on display.  So, I had to make it much, much smaller. At first, I thought about deleting some locations, but I didn't want to do that because I had worked so hard.

 

Then, I thought, I should make all the layers available, and people would only purchase the layers they wanted, like a customizable Marauder's Map. That seemed like the perfect compromise. However, with a map this big, making the covers of each layer close perfectly, without any space between was challenging. The more layers there are, the thicker the map gets, and the more difficult it is to make the cover fit and close properly.

 

So, I had to make the pages that connect to the middle of the map much larger to fix that issue. Now, since there are many, many possible combinations of the layers and the order you put them in, I would need to prepare larger pages for all of those possible combinations. To be perfectly honest, this seemed impossible. It's obviously doable, but it's beyond absurd to do that. It would take a lot of time and I was running out of patience with the project.

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So, after days of thinking and rethinking and changing my mind and then changing it again, I figured I should do a limited number of map versions. So I started playing around with different configurations.

 

I wanted maps to have some layers in common, and other layers to be version specific. So version 1 and 2 would share some layers, but they would be different because one would have a layer that the other wouldn't. But that would mean one would be thicker than the other. I didn't like that idea, so I decided to have all the maps with the same number of pages.

 

After a lot of playing around, I came up with three different map versions. All three are similar, but then each map is unique in its own way.

 

    Map version one focuses more on the world surrounding the castle, and then presenting an overview of it.

 

    The third version focuses heavily on details. A lot of locations, and the only version that has the Hogwarts dungeons.

 

    Finally, map version two is a combination of one and three. It doesn't have the dungeons layer, but it does have a lot of locations and presents an overview of the entire castle.

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