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A trip back in time with the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child artwork: from then to now

《哈利·波特与被诅咒的孩子》的艺术作品：从开始到现在

 

The Wizarding World always sparks imagination – as we’ve seen with so many interpretations of the Harry Potter stories over the years. As Cursed Child unveils new reimagined artwork, we step back with their design team Muse to study the evolution of its design.

魔法世界总是能激发人们的想象力——多年来，我们已经看到了对《哈利·波特》故事的各种诠释。当被诅咒的孩子揭开了新的重新想象的艺术品，我们与他们的设计团队缪斯后退一步，研究其设计的演变。

 

From the cinematic creations conceived by design team MinaLima, to the carefully detailed illustrations of Jim Kay, so many facets of the wizarding world have been brought to life by an endless number of talented artists.

从MinaLima设计团队构思的电影创作，到Jim Kay的详细插图，魔法世界的许多方面都被无数才华横溢的艺术家赋予了生命。

 

Whether it’s a lovingly hand-painted piece of fan art, or an epic installation at the Warner Bros. Studio Tours, it seems like every nuance of the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts stories has, at some point or another, been invigorated by talented minds. Just think of the delicate carvings of a characters’ wand or the glorious CGI magical creatures we see in the films designed from scratch. We’ve seen it all. Because what could inspire an artist more than the impossibilities of magic?

无论是一幅可爱的手绘同人画作，还是华纳兄弟工作室之旅的史诗般的装置作品，似乎哈利波特和神奇动物故事中的每一个细微之处都在某种程度上受到了天才们的激发。想想那些角色魔杖的精致雕刻，或者我们在电影中看到的那些从零开始设计的神奇生物。我们都看到了。因为还有什么比不可能的魔法更能激发艺术家的灵感呢?

 

In 2016, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was unveiled at London’s Palace Theatre, with the front of house adorned with a lone child trapped in a mysterious nest with wings. After years of associating Harry Potter with round glasses, the lightning bolt scar, or the rustic turrets of Hogwarts castle – the eighth story in the franchise had invented a new moment of iconography for a new Wizarding World era.

2016年，《哈利·波特与被诅咒的孩子》在伦敦宫殿剧院揭幕，房子的正面装饰着一个孤独的孩子，被困在一个有翅膀的神秘鸟巢中。多年来，哈利·波特总是让人联想到圆眼镜、闪电伤疤、霍格沃茨城堡质朴的塔楼——《哈利·波特》系列的第八个故事为魔法世界的新时代创造了新的形象。

 

Now, the hit play has rejuvenated its artwork as it prepares to reopen in theatres across the world, showing two figures swirling through time in swaths of deep purple. So, what do they denote? And how was it conceived?

现在，这部热播剧重新焕发了艺术活力，准备在世界各地的剧院重新开放，剧中有两个人物在深紫色的条纹中旋转。它们表示什么?它是如何构思的?

 

It was a team effort to achieve the finished product, with Cursed Child’s production team and marketing agency AKA all contributing to the look and feel you see below. But it was down to creative agency Muse Creative Communications to fully conceptualise this fresh visual celebration of the play – and to build upon the original concept.

《被诅咒的孩子》的制作团队和营销机构AKA共同努力完成了成品。但最终还是由创意公司缪斯创意传播公司将这部全新的视觉盛宴完全概念化，并在原有概念的基础上加以构建。

 

We spoke to co-founders of Muse, Shaun Gale and Marc Evanson on how they retold the tale of Cursed Child through a number of artistic concepts – and how they tackled such a challenge in the throes of a pandemic lockdown. The first job? Taking the original concept and building upon it with something fresh.

我们采访了Muse的联合创始人肖恩·盖尔和马克·埃万森，了解他们是如何通过一系列艺术概念重新讲述了被诅咒的孩子的故事，以及他们是如何在疫情封锁的痛苦中应对这一挑战的。第一份工作吗?采用最初的概念并在此基础上添加一些新内容。

 

“It feels like quite a long time ago now,” Marc said, when we asked him how it all started.

当我们问马克这一切是怎么开始的时候，他说:“感觉好像是很久以前的事了。”

 

“Shaun and I didn’t actually know each other before Cursed Child came along. Shaun had designed the original nest concept and when it came to actually realising that and creating key art, we met on the photoshoot, photographing the ‘child’... so in an odd kind of way, if it wasn’t for Harry Potter, Muse wouldn’t have formed. After that, we became friends, stayed in contact and things aligned in 2018 to create Muse. We were heavily involved in that first concept and it was really nice that Sonia [Friedman] and the producers reached out to us again recently to see how things could evolve.”

“在被诅咒之子出现之前，肖恩和我其实并不认识。肖恩设计了最初的鸟巢概念，当他真正意识到这一点并创作出关键的艺术作品时，我们在拍摄“孩子”时相遇了……所以用一种奇怪的方式，如果没有哈利·波特，缪斯就不会形成。在那之后，我们成为了朋友，一直保持联系，并在2018年创建了Muse。我们在第一个概念中投入了大量精力，索尼娅(弗里德曼)和制片人最近再次联系我们，看看事情会如何发展，这真的很好。”

 

In the beginning, fans were urged to ‘keep the secrets’ of Cursed Child, to respectfully give time to those who wouldn’t get a chance to see the magic of the play for a while. This posed a challenge for the posters and artwork, with Muse creating something both ambiguous but layered with meanings. During his time at previous creative agency Feast Creative, Shaun conceptualised the child in a nest idea, which would soon go on to grace poster artwork for several products of Cursed Child across the world. It even sparked fan theories on what it all meant.

一开始，粉丝们被要求“保守‘被诅咒的孩子’的秘密”，以尊重那些暂时没有机会看到这出戏剧魔力的人。这对海报和艺术品构成了挑战，缪斯创作了一些既模糊又有意义的东西。在他之前的创意公司Feast creative工作期间，肖恩构思了一个“窝里的孩子”的概念，这个想法很快就被用于世界各地被诅咒的孩子的一些产品的海报艺术创作。这甚至引发了粉丝们对这一切意味着什么的猜测。

 

“We were given fundamental key points: time travel, abandonment and protection,” Shaun explained. “I thought this was such a strong metaphor for abandonment, when a lone bird is left on its own in a nest – I just couldn’t think of a better way to reflect abandonment than that. And the wings kind of evoked time travel in a very metaphorical way. But fundamentally, ever since the beginning, there was also a subliminal image of the Snitch within the image that wasn’t coincidental.”

“我们被赋予了基本的要点:时间旅行、放弃和保护，”肖恩解释道。“我认为这是遗弃的强烈隐喻，当一只孤独的鸟独自留在巢中——我只是想不出比这更好的方式来反映遗弃。”翅膀以一种非常隐喻的方式唤起了时间旅行。但从根本上说，从一开始，那张照片里就有金色飞贼的潜意识图像，这不是巧合。”

 

“It’s always the classic part of the brief – we want to have something iconic,” Marc added. “it’s probably the most overused phrase, but everyone wants it, whatever that is. And to us, it’s something visually simple and often symbolic that really encapsulates the essence of the play. Creatively, we’ve been in this industry for many years and it’s a difficult thing to do – it’s probably the hardest thing to do, to create something simple. And actually, to have that memorability image that people do recall and to have longevity. What Shaun created so beautifully and brilliantly was this metaphoric creation, this image, which ended up being iconic.”

马克补充说:“这一直是设计的经典部分，我们想要一些标志性的东西。”这可能是最被滥用的说法了，但不管那是什么，每个人都想要它。对我们来说，这是一些视觉上简单且通常具有象征意义的东西，真正地概括了戏剧的本质。创造性，我们在这个行业已经有很多年了，这是一件困难的事情——可能是最困难的事情，创造一些简单的东西。事实上，拥有人们能回忆起的记忆图像并长寿。Shaun创造的如此美丽和出色的是这个隐喻性的创作，这个形象，最终成为了标志性的。”

 

With seven books and eight Harry Potter films already out and beloved by fans across the world, Muse faced the secondary challenge of trying to create iconography that was as well-known as what the book covers, and film posters had already tackled. The Harry Potter theatrical campaigns of the films, for example, famously employed darker themes in the artwork as the films progressed.

已经出版了七本书和八部哈利波特电影，受到全世界粉丝的喜爱，缪斯面临着第二个挑战，试图创造出像书封面一样出名的肖像，电影海报已经处理好了。例如，《哈利·波特》系列电影的戏剧宣传，随着电影的发展，在艺术作品中采用了众所周知的黑暗主题。

 

As fans of Harry Potter already, (“I’d read all the books and seen all the films,” Marc laughed) the pair tried to remove themselves from what they already knew.

作为哈利波特的粉丝，(“我读过所有的书，看过所有的电影，”马克笑着说)这对夫妇试图把自己从已知的东西中剥离出来。

 

“When you’re working on something so well-known and there’s an automatic visual that people recognise, that was part of the challenge as well, to disconnect. It was still Harry Potter but a reimagination of it. And that was very important to convey that difference,” Marc said. “Everyone was involved, everyone was inputting their thoughts. It was very much an evolving process which I think really helped because there’s so many layers to the play. There’s such an enormous team involved, the set designs and costumes and lighting and sound – it’s phenomenal.”

“当你在做一个如此知名的东西时，有一种人们能够识别的自动视觉效果，这也是挑战的一部分，即断开连接。它仍然是《哈利·波特》，但是对它的重新想象。传达这种差异非常重要，”马克说。“每个人都参与进来，每个人都在输入自己的想法。这是一个不断发展的过程，我认为这真的很有帮助，因为戏剧有这么多层面。有一个如此庞大的团队参与其中，布景设计、服装、灯光和声音——这是惊人的。”

 

So, the nest became a staple at the Palace Theatre in the centre of Leicester Square. And the pair, based in the UK, still get excited whenever they walk past.

因此，鸟巢成为了莱斯特广场中心的宫殿剧院的主要建筑。这对住在英国的情侣每次经过这里都会感到兴奋。

 

“Even now, friends and family send us photographs saying, ‘Look, we know the person who did that’ – and even now when I walk past it, I take photographs even though I’ve seen it a billion times,” Shaun admitted.

肖恩承认:“即使是现在，朋友和家人给我们发照片说，‘看，我们知道是谁干的’——即使是现在，当我走过它时，我还是会拍下照片，尽管我已经看过它无数次了。”

 

Skip five years later, and Cursed Child became an international award-winning success worldwide, earning plaudits on Broadway, with other productions announced for Melbourne, San Francisco, Hamburg, Toronto and Tokyo. When the world stopped in its tracks in early 2020 in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, theatres, among other entertainment venues, were left devastated, shutting down in various countries for months.

五年后，《被诅咒的孩子》在世界范围内获得了成功的国际奖项，在百老汇赢得了赞誉，还在墨尔本、旧金山、汉堡、多伦多和东京宣布了其他作品。在2019冠状病毒病大流行之后，世界在2020年初停滞不前，剧院和其他娱乐场所遭到严重破坏，多个国家关闭了几个月。

 

During lockdown, the producers of Cursed Child decided to use this time of reflection to reimagine the play. It was recently announced that Cursed Child would return as a reimagined singular performance in New York, San Francisco and Toronto, moving on from its original two-part structure.

在禁闭期间，《被诅咒的孩子》的制作人决定利用这段反思的时间重新构想这部剧。最近有消息称，《被诅咒的孩子》将在纽约、旧金山和多伦多以一种经过重新构思的独特演出形式回归，取代原来的两部分结构。

 

As for the design side of things, Shaun and Marc returned to offer up new concepts, this time, looking at the story from a different perspective. The finished product is a striking development from the bronzes and browns of the original art – now showcasing grandiose, swirling clockwork, amassed in dark smoke and golden fire. The contrast of the light and darkness was very much intentional.

在设计方面，Shaun和Marc回归，提出了新的概念，这一次，他们从不同的角度来看待故事。最终的作品是原始艺术中青铜色和棕色的惊人发展——现在展示的是宏伟的、旋转的发条装置，积聚在黑烟和金色火焰中。光明与黑暗的对比是有意为之的。

 

“We began working up a new look for the artwork in the depths of Covid when there wasn’t a lot of uplift and people needed hope. It was a very dark time for us all, and when we were working on this, it was a serious matter – so having something that could offer that light, that beacon, was really key,” Marc said.

“在新冠病毒肆虐期间，没有多少振奋人心的东西，人们需要希望，我们开始为作品设计新的外观。对我们所有人来说，那是一段非常黑暗的时期，当我们在研究这个问题时，这是一个严肃的问题，所以有一些东西可以提供光明，灯塔，真的是非常关键，”马克说。

 

The new artwork focuses heavily on time travel: a key plot point in the play. Shaun and Marc worked on over 70 drafts of the artwork with this theme in mind before hitting the desired effect, all the while keeping the DNA of its predecessor.

新的艺术作品着重于时间旅行:这是该剧的一个关键情节点。在达到预期效果之前，Shaun和Marc基于这一主题完成了70多份草稿，同时保留了之前作品的元素。

 

“It was evolution, not revolution,” Shaun explained. “This was moving on but to be sympathetic to the nest and the wings and that original shape, that structure, hopefully that’s still reflected subliminally when people see it.”

“这是进化，而不是革命，”肖恩解释道。“这是在前进，但对鸟巢、翅膀和原始形状、结构的同情，希望当人们看到它时，仍能潜意识地反映出来。”

 

“We realised the aspect of time in different ways and different plains were all circular,” Marc said. “That Snitch shape was something we found ourselves being draw back to. We did explore other concepts that didn’t have that but we kept on feeling like that synergy was so strong.”

马克说:“我们意识到时间以不同的方式存在，不同的平原都是圆形的。”“我们发现自己被那个金色飞贼的形状吸引住了。我们也探索了其他概念，但我们一直觉得这种协同作用非常强大。”

 

Along with retaining those motifs, Muse were also tasked with other challenges, such as injecting the artwork with the energy of live theatre and weaving more elements of time travel within the entire piece.

除了保留这些主题，缪斯还面临着其他挑战，如为艺术品注入现场戏剧的能量，并在整个作品中编织更多的时间旅行元素。

 

“While the nest was metaphorical and poetic – the desire here was to give more of an understanding of what is to come, what this spectacle really is. The energy and electricity and the magic were the key objectives,” Shaun said.

“虽然鸟巢是隐喻和诗意的——这里的愿望是给予更多的理解，这是什么是真正的奇观。能量、电力和魔法是主要目标，”肖恩说。

 

And as for creating this new artwork while working remotely in a lockdown? The team certainly got more creative than usual with their colleagues. In one of their older designs, which featured a wizard holding aloft a wand triumphantly, Shaun and Marc recruited their art director Miles Mittra to pose with... a toilet brush.

至于在隔离状态下远程工作的情况下创作新作品呢?这个团队显然比以往更有创造力了。在他们以前的一款设计中，一个巫师得意洋洋地举着魔杖，肖恩和马克请了他们的艺术总监迈尔斯·米特拉和他们合影……一个马桶刷。

 

“With some clever retouching, he put a cape on himself, we changed the toilet brush to a wand, which was quite important!” laughed Shaun. “And we’d do Zoom calls, send sketches backwards and forwards, there was a lot of experimentation.”

“经过一些巧妙的修饰，他给自己穿上了斗篷，我们把马桶刷换成了魔杖，这很重要!”“肖恩笑了。“我们会给Zoom打电话，来回发送草图，有很多实验。”

 

From there, the team worked on post-production with their photographer Seamus to bring the sketches to reality.

之后，团队与摄影师谢默斯一起进行后期制作，将草图变成现实。

 

“We’ve worked with Seamus many times before – he was the best person we worked with in terms of lighting,” Shaun said. “Even in post-production on the shots Seamus took, it was hours of retouching.”

“我们以前和谢默斯合作过很多次——他是我们在照明方面合作过的最好的人，”肖恩说。“即使是谢默斯拍摄的后期制作，也要花好几个小时来修饰。”

 

Seamus was instrumental in helping light the two shadowy figures we see on the poster - Harry and his son, Albus. The team worked together to create mystery in the figures, to pay homage to the several different actors who play Harry and Albus across the world.

西莫帮我们照亮了海报上的两个身影——哈利和他的儿子阿不思。为了向在世界各地扮演哈利和阿不思的几位不同演员致敬，该团队共同创作了这些人物的神秘色彩。

 

“Fundamentally, you’re creating a silhouette image of the two characters. That was part of the challenge of the brief as well – the central figures are Harry and Albus – but for longevity and to create a bit more of an iconic image, they’re recognisable – it’s about making sure their poses and expressions told a story, even if you could not see the expressions on their faces. So, to get the key lighting to create something that wasn’t a solid block of black was really important with the right photographer as well.”

“从根本上说，你是在创造两个角色的剪影形象。这是挑战的一部分短暂的——主要人物是哈利和阿不思·但对长寿和创造更多的一个标志性形象,他们认可——这是确保他们的姿态和表情告诉一个故事,即使你看不到他们脸上的表情。所以，在正确的摄影师的帮助下，让关键的灯光创造出一些不是纯黑色的东西是非常重要的。”

 

So, with Cursed Child’s various returns to theatres across the world on the horizon, the future looks bright not just for Muse, who have already launched themselves into new projects, but for the many homes of Cursed Child across the world.

因此，随着《被诅咒的孩子》在世界各地各大影院的回归，不仅对已经投身新项目的缪斯公司，而且对世界各地许多被诅咒的孩子的家庭来说，未来都是光明的。

 

“The future’s looking optimistic actually,” Marc said. “There’s a lot of positive producers out there and it’s amazing to see. We’ve been fortunate to be involved in some of these productions, and I know it must be so difficult when you do get a setback, but what it’s shown is – this industry will not get knocked over and stay down and it’s great to see.”

“实际上，未来看起来很乐观，”马克说。“有很多积极的制作人，这很令人惊讶。我们很幸运能参与其中的一些制作，我知道当你遇到挫折时一定很困难，但事实证明，这个行业不会被击倒，不会停滞不前，看到这样的结果很好。”

 

“Shaun and I have had the privilege of seeing this show more than once, and it’s such an amazing production,” he added. “And it’s had a lot of meaning for us for simply being Harry Potter as well. Will there ever be a theatrical event as big and as worldwide as this?”

他补充道:“我和肖恩有幸看了这部剧不止一次，这是一部非常棒的作品。”“仅仅是成为哈利·波特对我们来说也有很多意义。还会有像这样的盛大的世界盛事吗?”