Directors for the first Harry Potter movie insisted on using real owls to deliver letters, spending six months training the birds to carry envelopes in their beaks.

A closer look

Directors for the first Harry Potter movie insisted on using real owls to deliver letters, spending six months training the birds to carry envelopes in their beaks. This absurd dedication to practical effects resulted in dozens of ruined takes because the owls kept dropping the letters, flying into cameras, or just refusing to cooperate. In a movie literally filled with magical computer-generated trolls and flying broomsticks, they decided the mail delivery system needed to be grounded in absolute avian reality. CGI would have saved thousands of hours and probably some bird sanity