Photos from the set of Da Vinci's Demons season 1 have been shared by set decorator David Morison. A fascinating interview with the Da Vinci's Demons season 2 set decorator Joelle Rumbelow, reveals the detail which goes into making the sets for the show look so amazing. The interview includes a previously unseen photo of Tom as Leonardo - sadly it is very small and blurry. Read it in full here.
And then we have Da Vinci’s quarters…
For Da Vinci, this time we did more in his bedroom than in his workshop, but we can’t be precious with any of it, because it always gets trashed or destroyed or put on fire! There was a lot of destruction in Season 2, so we had to be really careful about what we put in these sets. In his workshop, we saw more bones and skulls and art works with them. We have an artist in-house to draw for us, and we found another amazing artist that did metal plating onto skulls, and other interesting pieces. So it’s a matter of adapting and fabricating things that if they got destroyed, it wouldn’t cost us a fortune.
We’ve expanded the light, adding more reflective surfaces for camera and mood.
We’re also adding in more mechanical elements. There are several great international dealers that bring rustic stuff from Eastern Europe to some of the big antique fairs in the UK. So we buy quite a lot of that rustic dressing, the old farm machinery and items like that, which we can adapt into engineering pieces.
Propmaster Julian Luxton is really heavily involved in Da Vinci’s inventions. He works a lot with the artist Michael Van Kesteren, and they work out the details of the inventions. It’s intriguing to see them going through that process, because the pieces are so complex. You find yourself asking all sorts of strange questions, and sometimes it even becomes a whole department debate!
