The arrival of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to the big screen was a huge success, as JK Rowling’s best-seller did the same on the big screen. Of course, video game adaptations came along, including the one developed by the studio KnowWonder para PC.
The study, under the supervision of Electronic Artscreated the most powerful version of all formats and they found themselves with a really tricky problem. And it is that along the corridors of Hogwarts we can come across the mythical paintings that come to life, but the company did not know how to deal with the always complicated copyrights.
Christo Vuchetich, member of the KnowWonder team, revealed in an interview the fantastic masterstroke which they carried out so that no legal threat would loom over them.
“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 which paintings are no longer under some kind of copyright protection. Not only was it going to take an enormous amount of time, but the money was also just out of reach.
So I did a little research and decided that, you know what, we’re just going to put ourselves in there. We’re going to take all these famous paintings and I just gave the task to each artist on the team: find a famous painting and Photoshop your face into it. And we would just change it just enough so that it’s not legally that painting. So there’s a portrait of me in there, there’s a portrait of every single person, all of those portraits of those people in there are somehow another person on the team that they Photoshopped themselves into these famous paintings.”
That’s right. As Vuchetich reveals, the secret to success came with resort to the ever-reliable Photoshop to cut out the faces of people in the paintings and replace them with KnowWonder’s own employees. We don’t know if this method is still legal, but in any case they avoided a big legal mess.
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