Ministry of Mayhem

A slightly different show to re-create here I know but I thought the attention needed to be taken away from the samey GMB mocks that have been dominating the front page here lately.

As a viewer of Ministry of Mayhem (I was 17/18 at the time) and a contributor to the original thread on here I got to know the show quite well.

I originally started off with the set introduced on the first show and progressed to the set that they had until 2006. TVF member fanoftv has seen a preview of these some weeks ago and my re-creation of the first set and only I've only just finished this ready for publish.

If you've seen my Big Breakfast house re-creations on here you know the standard I work to.

What you're seeing here is the set in the dimensions of Studio 2 at the Maidstone studios where the show was made in natural light (no studio lighting)

When this set debuted, it was originally very dark.

Starting off with the stage area:


Main Sofa:


The Doctor's Lab: (later became a sit-down area for Holly & Stephen)


The lava lamps were made from scratch (No pun intended!)

Anyone for a game of Cakey Sk8?


Watching from the audience area:


Now for the set with studio lighting:

The finished article is waiting up Jason. The attention to detail is fantastic. I like how you've kept part of the old set peeking in outside of the studio.

If you look closely behind the revolving door in the last pic you can see the set for the sketch Buthaven which is still unfinished at the moment However if my model of studio 2 is correct, it must have been a very small set back there as the whole main set goes right to the back of the wall.

Also what was interesting to find out from watching my tapes was that the audience seating and the steps was set at an angle and the balcony wasn't.

This is a good start for first attempt. 3/5 already!

Find this one quite difficult to visualise actually as such sets very much rely on the crowd filling them, but really appreciate a mock that isn't GMB or BBC News.

I concur.

I think a bit of re-texturing re-lighting and re-rendering will improve this. As far as i can tell, the majority of the models are fairly close to the pictures of the original set i've seen.

For help with visualisation, maybe if possible OP could post some images that are populated with those creepy grey people for scale?

I get the impression that you're going to keep tweaking this. I look forward to seeing those improvements.

The original model is how it looked when it debuted on the very first week of the re-launch. Back then the majority of it was very dark with little lighting so I've gone by what's been seen on screen.

Indeed I am going to tweak it as I re-watch some of the later episodes when they started to add lighting around the audience area and other places etc.

I found this article while searching for pictures of the set which explains some of the problems they had with lighting:
http://www.lsionline.co.uk/news/story/PixelPARs-at-Ministry-of-Mayhem/IKY8LW

I've tweaked the lighting on the main set, I think this looks better. This is not done in sketch up but with a tool that architects might use.

Been tinkering around with the texture on the revolving door. As I've watched more episodes recently there appears to be a yellow and purple lighting colour scheme around the set which I've tried to replicate in this image: