As a small preview to the wizard rock gift-buying guide that I’ve put together, I took a moment to talk with Julia from the PwnCast of WRock, who have designed a wizard rock themed calendar for 2009.

Julia got the idea when she wasn’t too pleased with the official Harry Potter calendar for 2008 and wanted something Potter-themed to be able to track wizard rock and other Harry Potter events. “Knowing that my Photoshop skills are non-existent, I asked Cody, the only person I know who would be up to the task of creating about 27 pages of Wizard Rock awesomeness.”

While Cody designed the pages, Julia and Dan took care of everything else – “finding photos, asking photographers for permission to use their photos, getting the bands’ approval for their pages, finding lyrics, helping with publicity, some of the technical website aspects, etc.” While finding photos of wizard rockers isn’t terribly difficult, tracking down every photographer proved to be a bit daunting. “After running into some obstacles early in the process with finding photos and then finding the photographer to ask for credit permission, we reversed the process. We asked photographers who we knew had a large repertoire of Wizard Rock photos for their permission, and once it was given found photos from there.”

Each page has a few photographs as the main picture with lyrics printed around them. You can check out The Parselmouths‘ page here and Tonks and the Aurors‘ page here to see for yourself. The date pages are posted over additional photos, and even include some very important Harry Potter related dates. Personally, I was unaware of Hagrid’s and Charlie Weasley’s birthdays until I got the chance to see the December date page, featuring Harry and the Potters. I just hope that May includes a mention of the Battle of Hogwarts!

As for the lyrics, most of the songs were chosen because they are the most popular or iconic of the band. “We wanted the songs most people think of when they think of each band. Beyond that, we used songs that were favorites of ours, but also ones which were popular enough that others would recognize the lyrics easily …We do apologize for any mistakes we made with lyrics, but for the majority of the songs we used, there was no text database to find the lyrics, so we simply listened to the songs to find the lyrics. By the nature of some songs, it’s sometimes difficult to accurately decide exactly what the singer is saying, so we made educated guesses.”

The calendars are being printed by printpelican.com, and will be available until they run out. All profits are being donated to the Harry Potter Alliance. You can order yours from the website here.