Tour St. Vladimir's With 'Vampire Academy' Director Mark Waters

'Vampire Academy' Director Mark Waters shared exclusive St. Vladimir pictures with Yahoo! Movies and talked a bit about the process of picking the locations for the movies signature scenes! See all the pictures below as well as an excerpt of his Interview.

"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."

"This is the church attic where Lissa and Christian first meet up, then slowly see their attraction grow.  It is a set we built on stage at Pinewood Studios, with the whole style of it pulled from the style of Charterhouse School so it blends right in.  We tried to give it a comfortable "lounge" feeling, even though it's a reading room in a church attic, like Christian and Lissa had turned it into their secret clubhouse."

All St. Vlads Photos:

 

Read Mark Waters complete breakdown of the Vampire Academy sets HERE.

Richelle Mead Shares Exclusive Pics from ‘Vampire Academy’ Set with Yahoo! Movies

"The cast was so friendly and outgoing, and within 15 minutes of me arriving, nearly all of them stopped by to say hello and introduce themselves," Mead said as she described the photos from her visit which she shared with Yahoo! Movies exclusively. "The picture of me with Zoey and Cameron [Monaghan] was taken on the first day of my set visit. They were filming in a university lecture hall, and I got to take a seat right there with the students."

"[This] photo was taken on the last day of my two-day visit," she recalled. "I didn't actually believe they'd have a chair for me since my visit was so short, but they did! It took a fair amount of searching for it (and all the other cast chairs) because the crew moved around filming that day and kept taking the chairs with them," she explained. "Finding this reward at the end of our 'scavenger hunt' was definitely worth it though."

You can read the entire article + gallery from Yahoo! Movies HERE