Yahoo Gives us A Tour at St Vladimir's with Mark Waters

A large part of directing is about taking the mental images that form when you read a piece of material, and then finding or building something in the real world that matches that vision. Certainly when I read "Vampire Academy" I had a very distinct picture in my brain of Richelle Mead's description of St. Vladimir’s, and I knew our first step in making the movie would be finding the real world place that could be our school.

We searched all around the world, first checking out the older prep schools and colleges in New England, then searching around Czechoslovakia, seeing many old estates and castles. Then we drove from Edinburgh, Scotland, down through the whole of the U.K. And just about an hour southwest of London, we finally arrived at the Charterhouse School. As soon as I saw the front courtyard I had that exhilirating feeling of everything locking into place. This school was not just my mental image of St. Vladimir's… it was better.

Luckily enough the school agreed to let us shoot there during their vacation breaks, and the look and feel of the school really defined the whole look and feeling of the film. The juxtaposition of the 1800's architecture with modern technology and modern teenagers is something that I think gives our movie a real distinctiveness.

Even though we shot our movie in England, St. Vladimir’s is of course in the middle of Montana, so we did a lot of things to make it seem like we were there.  Putting up our own Montana welcome sign was easy.  Using visual fx to add mountains to the background of almost all of our exterior shots - that was hard.

Since we are dealing with vampires after all, a great deal of our movie is set at night or at magic hour, either dusk or dawn, so there was no direct sun in the sky.  As you can see from this raking angle of the front of the school, the architecture has a character that defines the tone of the movie.  Awe-inspiring, comfortable in its old world familiarity, but also slightly imposing and scary.

Even though Dhampir aren't sensitive to the sun, they must adhere to the Moroi nocturnal timetable.  Liked the idea of essentially having outdoor "gym class" with the facade of the school of the background, only it's nighttime, and the Dhampir idea of physical education is much more intense than a human class.  So we built this hard core training apparatus with grueling exercise equipment like the astronaut training gyroscope.

Read More of the Amazing Tour by Mark Waters, here at YahooMovies