Following the USA Today print article reported previously, MSNBC now has a five-minute video exclusively about the creation of Buckbeak, the gray hippogriff featured in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The written article included with the video is basically just a transcript of the featurette – so those who can’t work the MSN player needn’t fear! One of the most interesting bits of trivia is Beaky’s “incredible shrinking wings”… “‘To fly something the scale of a horse, you need big wings,’ says visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett. ‘And if you look at the creature, we’ve figured out basically the right proportions were about 30 odd feet, 28 feet, for a wingspan of that size.’ There was only one problem: Wings that big would drag on the ground and even trip a hippogriff. So the animators did the only sensible thing. ‘Essentially we cheated,’ says Burke. ‘We had smaller wings when he was on the ground and bigger wings when he was flying. But hopefully you won’t notice.'”