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.