Film and Furniture: Avenue 5 is an awe-inspiring space ship. Can you talk us through your design process for the film sets?

Simon Bowles: I set out wanting to give Avenue 5 a brand new look, something we haven’t seen before on any television drama or movie. I didn’t want to create ‘funny scenery’, I wanted the comedy to come from the situation and the characters. The sci-fi backdrop had to be believable, especially to todays tech-savvy audience.

I always approach a project head on. My mantra is to get the big decisions made as soon as possible so I have plenty of time to make the design decisions of the smaller details. For me those small details make the sets more realistic. Those decisions could be finding tiny pieces of prop dressing to put on a set that will inform the audience of a characters past, or having time to add careful ageing to choice pieces of key furniture.

For Avenue 5 I decided to use as much up-to-date 3D design technology to steer the way I work towards something futuristic. Without considering real-world forces like gravity and the weight of materials I could design the sets by sculpting huge structures in this virtual world.

I have an amazing team Avenue 5: My key concept artist Jort Van Welbergen loaded the 3D set designs into a virtual reality headset so I could walk around the spaces as if I were on the finished sets. I could consider details of the set and the flow of the script through the spaces before construction even started. It sounds odd but the emotion of the set is far more apparent in virtual reality. A looming piece of architecture is far clearer in virtual reality, a tight space more claustrophobic when standing in it. As well as creating traditional printed illustrations of these sets to show our wonderful Director Armando Iannucci, I could now also walk him around them in virtual reality, exploring the complex spaces, to consider the blocking and camera angles and even influencing some of the scriptwriting with these physical structures in mind.

While conceptualising the sets I designed the lighting as an integral part with sculptural elements; lit floating clouds, Art Deco pillars of light and glowing lines to accentuate the architectural form. I employed the use of colour-changing LED’s so that at a press of a button I could change the set from day, to sunset, to night. In fact we counted up how much LED light tape we’d used at the end of the season; over five miles!

The sets and furniture were designed using 3D software from which we created tabletop models using 3D printers. We had up to eight 3D printers and a team of model makers building maquettes of all the sets and even the entire ship.

 

F&F: How did you go about designing the multi-story Atrium of this space cruise liner?

 

F&F: Was this all created from your own imagination or were you working to a brief?

 SB: This is the first time I have had the pleasure of working with Armando Iannucci. He is wonderful human being and a comedy genius. We met just as I was designing Johnny English Strikes Again in March 2017. At that point there was no real script, just a fabulous plan in his head.

 

 A few months later a synopsis landed in my in-box; Avenue 5. Looking back at it now, the final series is so close to that original document. I suggested to Armando that the ship could have been originally a grungy, industrial fuel/liquid/oxygen transporter ship that had been converted by the Judd corporation into a cruise ship by bolting a sleek white hotel onto the front. The passenger area would look beautiful, made from marble, gold and huge white curving walls. I created some 3D models of the ship to present to Armando to illustrating the two contrasting worlds onboard. I just loved the idea that a crew member could slide open a hidden door within the sleek, clean passenger area and enter the noisy, smelly, grungy rear part of the ship. They’d then wipe their feet and check their hair before re-joining the passengers.

 

 

F&F: Were there any challenges or major headaches with the design?

SB: I wanted the Atrium to be large and complex enough to be explored over many days of filming. We employed a huge number of carpenters, painters, plasterers, sculptors, structural engineers, steelworkers, glass engineers, prop makers, model makers, prop painters, electricians looking specifically after the LED lighting, carpet printers in Belgium, carpet layers, graphics printers, and more. Many more. 

 And then there’s all the gold. There are so many different colours and hues of gold. I ended up choosing one fabric sample of my chosen gold with my Set Decorator Liz Griffiths and cut it up into many pieces, giving samples to all our colleagues who lead the other creative departments so that all golds matched each other on furniture, props, sets, costumes and visual effects.

 

F&F: Why is the Conference Room inside a tree?

Armando had written in a Multifaith Prayer Room into the script. I relished designing this as I grew up in the medieval city of Wells in Somerset, England which has a very grand ancient cathedral at its heart. I have many memories exploring its vast nave and climbing the tight spiral staircase up to the Chapter House. I used these thirteenth century monastic structures as inspiration for the Avenue 5 Prayer Room, stripping back the details of the gothic architecture to bare sinews then creating them from white synthetic materials.

Get the Look! Avenue 5 furniture and decor