Harry Potter fans: cast your minds back to January. Half-Blood Prince is atop your winter must-see list, Deathly Hallows is still one movie and if you want to read The Tales of Beedle the Bard you'll need to dig $4m out from behind the sofa. It's the middle of the month, and RT has joined Daniel Radcliffe and company on day 80 of principal photography on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at Leavesden Studios in London.

We're here to tour the studio and speak to the stars, and we'll have a full set visit report in time for the film's release in July 2009. Before that, though, we thought we'd share a small teaser of our time at Hogwarts.


Familiar scenery - the Hogwarts Great Hall, Dumbledore's office, the Gryffindor common room - were present and accounted for, but we also glimpsed three very exciting new sets that will provide much of the film's visual impact. One of these; an imposing, tiled orphanage, will play host to an important flashback scene involving Dumbledore and a ten year-old boy Tom Marvolo Riddle -- a vulnerable, orphaned child, who turns out to be series villain Voldemort himself.

We also caught a glimpse of other new locations set aside for the film's finale. One half takes place in a giant cave and involves just Harry and Dumbledore. They had created an island of crystalline rock - think the Fortress of Solitude from Superman Returns - in a sea of green screen. This will, after months of effects work, be replaced by a mass of reanimated dead bodies called Inferi.


"The brilliant thing about [the cave scenes] was that we did them at the at the end of a three to four month period where Michael and I had been working together almost exclusively," Radcliffe told RT when we caught up with him for a long chat. "For about the first two or three months of this film we were almost the only two actors in. The relationship between me and Michael had really built up over that time and got to the point where after three or four months we were absolutely ready to do the cave stuff."