nestofstraightlines:mizgnomer:Behind the Scenes of Aziraphale’s Bookshop (as it burns down)Excerpt f
nestofstraightlines:mizgnomer:Behind the Scenes of Aziraphale’s Bookshop (as it burns down)Excerpt from The Nice and Accurate Good Omens TV Companion:Responsibility for the bookshop blaze fell to the special effects supervisor, Danny Hargreaves. Like everyone else in the cast and crew as filming at Bovingdon [Airfield - where the bookshop set was built] progressed, he had come to appreciate the scale and detail invested in the set by Michael Ralph [production designer].“I went from being just a guy on set to being the bad guy,” he laughs, as the man appointed to set fire to it. “It also broke my heart a little bit as there were thousands of book, tapestries, and beautiful grandfather clocks inside the shop that were real.”“Everything is under control,” Danny points out, “but there is a limit as to where that fire can go, and we took it right to that limit. The burn time inside the bookshop was quite long, because David Tennant had to do a whole scene in there. Now, as Crowley is from Hell that means fire is his thing. So David had to be very cool about being in there, and he did it so well. The radial heat coming out was incredible, and there were moments where I shut off the gas lines sooner rather than later. One time Douglas [Mackinnon, director] came out and questioned why I’d cut it. I had to point out that the roof was about to catch fire.”As the individual responsible for creating such a magical set, Michael Ralph considers the burn to be just another purpose for its existence.“What we’re doing is supporting the actor,” he says, “and the emotion around that actor. The set is monstrous, huge, but it isn’t the show.”No wonder Amazon was drawn to this project, they love destroying bookshops -- source link