Giant Pile of Rubble Terrorises Wellington City
What the hell's going on down Maginnity Street?!
Wrecked cars! A massive pile of rubble! Rescue crews moving in! OMG, the big one has finally hit!
And yet Petherick Tower is looking surprisingly undamaged...
All is revealed after the jump.
Why, it's a movie set.
It's for a TV3 docudrama called Aftershock, which examines what it might be like when the big one hits the capital. It's currently in production by the Gibson Group, and is due to screen in October.
Meanwhile, here are some more photos from the Maginnity Street shoot.
The news reporter is an actor doing a piece-to-camera. The boom operator is obviously real film crew, but the cameraman might also be a "cameraman":
If it hadn't been fenced off from the public, I would have run up the pile o' rubble and been all, "YOU MANIACS!":
And just in case you were worried that this was a little bit too real, this photo shows the neat edge of the rubble pile, as well as metal sheets protecting the road surface:
Come Monday morning, it'll all be cleaned up and we can blissfully pretend we don't live on a honking great faultline.
What have they done to Petherick Tower? What have they done to our fair sister?
Have they REALLY painted over the lovely baby blue paint job? (img. circa Dec 2005). The scoundrels!!!
again great shots ... it's the stuff like this you just don't see livin in the burbs .. we have to put up with all the real world melodramas :)
Not to disparage their earthquake simulation skills but why are the cars at the top of the rubble?
Wouldn't stuff have fallen on top of the cars?
From the other angle, one could see a small boat on top of the rubble, so my guess is that this is a post-Tsunami scenario.
If it was an SUV I'd say it was just someone's really bad parking skill. But otherwise, isn't there a parking building in that street it could have fallen out of?
A few years ago they did something very similar in the same street - it turned out to be filming an advertisement for Rav 4s
It's a very photogenic street. It's short, easy to close, and unlike most of Wellington, it doesn't have telltales hills lurking in the mid-distance.
Way cool. I'm proud to say that I was an extra in a shoot for this production last week (though in an office situation - nothing as exciting as this). It has quite a big budget and the script is not too shabby either.
Ooo one of our 48hour actors is in this