The release of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone on the big screen was a huge success, as was JK Rowling’s bestseller. Of course, there were also video game adaptations, including the one developed by the studio KnowWonder for PC.
The study under the supervision of Electronic Artshas created the most powerful version of all the formats and faced a really tricky problem. In the corridors of Hogwarts we can come across mythical paintings that come to life, but the company did not know how to deal with the always complicated copyright issues.
Christo Vuchetich, a member of the KnowWonder team, revealed in an interview the fantastic masterstroke They took these steps so that they would not be threatened by legal action.
“One of the things I realized pretty early on is that (…) there are portraits everywhere and everyone is talking. Where were we going to find all this art? We had to put pictures everywhere so we could license the rights to famous paintings or go through the process of finding out which paintings were out of copyright. Not only would that take an enormous amount of time, but the money was just prohibitive.
So I did a little research and decided we’d just put ourselves in there. We’re taking all these famous paintings and I gave each artist on the team the task: Find a famous painting and Photoshop your face into it. And we would just alter it enough so that it’s no longer legally that painting. So there’s a portrait of me in there, there’s a portrait of every single person, all of these portraits of these people in there are somehow another person on the team that they themselves Photoshopped into these famous paintings.”
That’s true. As Vuchetich reveals, the secret of success was use the always reliable Photoshop cutting out the faces of the people in the paintings and replacing them with those of KnowWonder’s own employees. We don’t know if this method is still legal, but in any case they avoided a major legal battle.
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