Childhood Christmas
Robert doesn't really like Christmas. Well, he likes Christmas itself, it's a nice holiday and the presents are a bonus, but there's one thing that upsets him.
Henry has to go home.
He can't stay around theirs for Christmas because he's got his own family to go home to.
So Henry's sadly packing his bags up, waiting for his father to come all the way down from Scotland to take him home for the holidays.
What neither of them realise is that Papa Lanyon has been in constant communication with Henry's parents for a short while now, seeing how upset and frustrated his son was getting over letting Henry go home and how quiet and sad Henry was getting over having to leave Robert.
So he's made a plan.
When the door finally rings, he goes to the door first, waiting for Henry to follow behind, seeing Robert hiding in a nearby doorway, arms crossed sullenly and a grouchy look on his round face.
"Why don't you open the door Henry?"
Henry's a little confused why, but he does so.
Only to find his mother stood there. Carrying luggage.
For a moment, he looks down at the luggage, confused. He sees his father stood just beside his mother, similarly with his own luggage.
His mother must've seen the confused look on his face because she gently explains to him that they're staying for Christmas at the Lanyon's house and that her and Papa Lanyon have been planning this for weeks.
Robert, confused on what's taking so long, wanting Henry to just be gone already so the moment isn't dragged out any longer and so his emotions don't bubble over and explode, looks out slightly from around the doorframe.
He catches his fathers gaze, seeing him looking back towards him and gesturing him over. He doesn't particularly want to go over, doesn't particularly want to meet new people, but something strange is going on. Eventually his curiosity gets the better of him and he slowly pads forwards, pudgy fists bunched tightly by his sides. Robert comes to stand behind his fathers leg, only peering out at the new people stood in his doorway.
He can see the resemblance to Henry. The lady his his smile and his nose, the man looks like Henry of he was older, but didn't have the charm or excitement that Henry did.
Speaking of Henry, he was excitedly jumping around, catching sight of Robert and happily bouncing over towards him.
"I'm staying! I'm staying for Christmas!" He laughed out, hands flapping happily. "I can stay! I can stay!"
Robert is utterly silent for the longest time, looking up at his father with soft confusion, not wanting to hope just yet.
Papa Lanyon just nods back slowly, smiling.
It only takes a moment before Robert is wordlessly hugging Henry tightly, hiding a small smile in his shoulder.
41 notes
·
View notes
SFX Magazine Issue 372 - Designing Good Omens ❤ 😊
PRODUCTION DESIGNER MICHAEL RALPH REVEALS HOW THE SHOW’S CENTREPIECE SET, WHICKBER STREET, WAS GIVEN A DEVILISHLY CLEVER UPGRADE FOR THE SECOND SEASON
WORDS: DAVE GOLDER
Invisible Columns And Thin Walls “The new studio is Pyramid Studios in Bathgate – it used to be a furniture warehouse. And unfortunately – or fortunately, because I accept these things as not challenges but gifts – right down the middle of that studio are a series of upright columns. But you’ll never spot them on screen. I had to build them in and integrate them into the walls and still get the streets between them. And it worked.
“There’s all sorts of cheeky design values to those sets. Normally a set like this is double-skin. In other words, you do an interior wall and an exterior wall, with an airspace in between. But really, the only time a viewer notices that there’s that width is at the doors and the windows. So I cheated all that. I ended up with single walls everywhere. So the exterior wall is the interior wall, just painted. All I did was make the sash windows and entrances wider to give it some depth as you walked in.”
GOOD OMENS HAD A CHANGE of location for its second season, but hopefully you didn’t notice. Because Whickber Street in Soho upped sticks from an airfield in Hertfordshire to a furniture warehouse in Bathgate, Edinburgh. It’s the kind of nonsensical geographical shenanigans that could only make sense in the crazy world of film and TV, and production designer Michael Ralph was the man in charge of rebuilding and expanding the show’s vast central set. “I wish we could have built more in season one than we did,” says Ralph, whose previous work has included Primeval and Dickensian. “We built the ground floor of everything and the facades of all the shops. But we didn’t build anything higher than that, because we were out on an airfield in a very, very difficult terrain and weather conditions, so we really couldn’t go much higher. Visual effects created the upper levels.”
But with season two the set has gone to a whole other level… literally. “What happened was that the rest of the street became integrated into the series’s storyline,” explains Ralph. “So we needed a record shop, we needed a coffee shop that actually had an inside, we needed a magic shop, we needed the pub. To introduce those meant we had to
change the street with a layout that works from a storylines point of view. In other words, things like someone standing at the counter in the record shop had to be able to eyeball somebody standing at the counter in the coffee shop. They had to be able to eyeball Aziraphale
sitting in his office in the window of the bookshop. But the rest of it was a pleasure to do inside, because we could expand it and I could go up two storeys.”
For most of the set, which is around 80 metres long and 60 metres wide, the two storeys only applied to the shop frontages, but in the case of Aziraphale’s bookshop, it allowed Ralph to build the mezzanine level for real this time. According to Ralph it became one of the cast and crews’ favourite places to hang out during down time.
But while AZ Fell & Co has grown in height, it actually has a slightly smaller footprint because of the logistics of adapting it to the new studio.
“Everybody swore to me that no one would notice,” says Ralph wryly. “I walked onto it and instinctively knew there was a difference
immediately, and they hated me for that. I have this innate sense about spatial awareness and an eye like a spirit level.
“It’s not a lot, though – I think we’ve lost maybe two and a half feet on the front wall internally. I think that there’s a couple of other smaller areas, but only I’d notice. So I can be really annoying to my guys, but only on those levels. Not on any other. They actually quite like me…”
Populating The Bookshop “The props in the new bookshop set were a flawless reproduction from the set decorator Bronwyn Franklin [who is also Ralph’s wife]. It was really the worst-case scenario after season one. She works off the concept art that I produce, but what she does is she adds so much more to the character of the set. She doesn’t buy anything she doesn’t love, or doesn’t fit the character.
“But the things she put a lot of work into finding for season one, they were pretty much one-offs. When we burnt the set down in the sixth episode, we lost a lot of props, many of which had been spotted and appreciated by the fans. So Bronwyn had to discover a new set decorating technique: forensic buying.
“She found it all – duplicates and replicas. It took ages. In that respect, the Covid delay was very helpful for Bron. There’s 7,000 books in there and there’s not one fake book. That’s mainly because… it’s a weird thing to say, but we wanted it to smell and feel like a bookshop
to everybody that was in it, all the time.
“It affects everybody subliminally; it affects everybody’s performance – actors and crew – it raises the bar 15 to 20%. And the detail, you know… We love a lot of detail.”
(look at the description under this, they called him 'Azi' hehehehe :D <3)
Aziraphale’s Inspirational Correspondence “There’s not one single scrap of paper on Aziraphale’s desk that isn’t written specifically for Aziraphale. Every single piece is not just fodder that’s been shoved
there, it has a purpose; it’s a letter of thanks, or an enquiry about a
book or something.
“Michael Sheen is so submerged in his character he would get lost
sitting at his own desk, reading his own correspondence between
takes. I believe wholeheartedly that if you put that much care into every single piece of detail, on that desk and in that room, that
everybody feels it, including the crew, and then they give that set
the same respect it deserves.
“They also lift their game because they believe that they’re doing something of so much care and value. Really, it’s a domino effect of passion and care for what you’re producing.”
Alternative Music “My daughter Mickey is lead graphic designer [two of Ralph’s sons worked on the series too, one as a concept artist, the other in props]. They’re the ones that produced all of that handwritten work on the desk. She’s the one that took on the record shop and made up 80 band names so that we didn’t have to get copyright clearance from real bands. Then she produced records and sleeves that spanned 50, 60 years of their recordings, and all of the graphics
on the walls.
“I remember Michael and Neil [Gaiman] getting lost following one band’s history on the wall, looking at their posters and albums desperately trying to find out whether they survived that emo period.”
It’s A Kind Of Magic One of the new shops in Whickber Street for season two was Will Goldstone’s Magic Shop, which is full of as many Easter eggs as off-the-shelf conjuring tricks, including a Matt Smith Doctor Who-style fez and a toy orang-utan that’s a nod to Discworld’s
The Librarian. Ralph says that while the series is full of references to Gaiman, Pratchett and Doctor Who, Michael Sheen never complained about a lack of Masters Of Sex in-jokes. “He’d be the last person to make that sort of comment!”
Ralph also reveals that the magic shop counter was another one of his
wife’s purchases, bought at a Glasgow reclamation yard.
The Anansi Boys Connection Ralph reveals that Good Omens season two used the state-of-the-art special effects tech Volume (famous for its use in The Mandalorian to create virtual backdrops) for just one sequence, but he will be using it extensively elsewhere on another Gaiman TV series being made for Prime Video.
“We used Volume on the opening sequence to create the creation of the universe. I was designing Anansi Boys in duality with this project, which seems an outrageously suicidal thing to do. But it was fantastic and Anansi Boys was all on Volume. So I designed for Volume on
one show and not Volume on the other. The complexities and the psychology of both is different.”
4K notes
·
View notes