Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1260764
Director ames akefi eld spent the next day, our Sunday off , making structural sense of the sketch and turning it into a construction drawing. The whole thing would sit on a tugboat and be taken out to sea. The result was what you see in The Crown. I have never travelled without pencil and paper since. That was just one of the seven components that made up our Britannia. The others were a deck built on a spit of land, the lower decks of HMS Belfast (moored in central London), a length of deck on the Elstree backlot, all of the digital elements shot via drone around the real Britannia in Edinburgh, a section of hull, complete with gang-plank, built on a Cape Town jetty, and Elizabeth and Philip's cabin built as a set on Stage 5 at Elstree Studios (with, of course, connective tissue). The key to the interior's success was three-fold —to keep the ceilings low, to taper the walls in imitation of a ship (not true to Britannia and barely perceptible to the camera but a surprisingly successful way to convince cast, crew and myself that a stage bound set is out at sea) and to replicate the bed arrangement of the Buckingham Palace private apartments so that Elizabeth's empty bed is always evident when Philip is on his world tour —thus her absence becomes a constant presence. Using the statistics of our estimable Supervising Art Director, Mark Raggett (with whom I've worked pretty consistently since The Madness of King George when I was Ken Adam's Supervising Art Director), we worked out that each season of The Crown averages around four hundred sets. That's forty per episode. Or one every minute- and-a-uarter. A massive undertaking for the set decoration team, headed by the hugely gifted Alison Harvey. The third term to enter The Crown vocabulary was "porte cochere," a grand covered porch for the coming and going of horses and carriages or, in our case, royal cars. There's a big one in the courtyard of the real Buckingham Palace and for season one, we built something a lot like it at Greenwich Naval College, visually but not structurally attaching it to an existing building that looked enough like Buckingham Palace. This had been a nerve-wracking undertaking in that the exposed location takes the full force of the wind from the river and so too does anything we build there. The location was built around three hundred years ago over a period of thirty years. Ours had to be built in two days and, by regulation, stand six inches away from the existing structure. It wasn't my favourite solution. The success of The Crown's fi rst two seasons led to a welcome rethink. With some cunning planning, we could build our own porte cochere at Elstree. A complete redesign and rebuild of the backlot sets meant that we could not only make it futureproof, we could travel from the street, through the perimeter gates of Buckingham Palace, through B A. THE BRITANNIA TUGBOAT SET. PLAN AND ELEVATIONS. B. SET DECORATION SAMPLE BOARD. PRINCESS MARGARET'S BEDROOM. A