DANIEL STRANGE: Nothing else is going to
look like Fire City.
It's got 3D, CG environments and like these
crazy camera moves.
And it's a nightmare in post-production.
I'll tell you that much, but it's pretty amazing.
KIM EVEY: Fire City is completely epic.
John Sims works in visual effects.
And he came in, and he pitched us this fantastical
world of Fire City.
DANIEL STRANGE: As soon as he got to the point in his pitch,
where it's revealed that the fire station is a billion
stories tall and is so tall that it extends out of the
Earth's atmosphere, I think that was the point where we
all were like, OK, if he can pull it off, I guess John Sims
is our guy.
JOHN SIMS: The decision to really try to create a world
as real as possible on a budget like we have was the
biggest challenge.
When you're a kid and you're imagining these things, you're
in this weird position, where you don't--
your imagination doesn't have any limits.
Then ironically, you're so limited with your means to
express that, like through your vocabulary, or your
artistic skills.
So I wanted to really do this kid's imagination justice.
So let's just make Fire City almost like an older science
fiction movie.
And that solved a lot of problems right there, and it
also solved lot of problems with design.
Like we're going for this kind of--
In some ways, Fire City was like was really great, an
exciting challenge, because we had some cool designers work
on this also.
Jhonen Vasquez, the creator of Invader Zim, designed a rocket
dog, a dalmatian.
I took him out to Bottom Noodles, and he just sketched
out a little space race era thing.
Not having a story that was really forward, it forced me
to figure out what would hold the audience's attention.
Fortunately, Adam included a character that had this seed
of being a really fascinating thing,
which was the Tychseria.
KIM EVEY: The fact that Aaron Douglas agreed to play
Tychseria, it's so wonderful to us,
because, you know, he's--
we're used to seeing Aaron in these sort of epic vistas from
Battlestar.
And now he's in the epic vista of Fire City.
AARON DOUGLAS: I didn't really understand the premise of what
this was all about.
And as you kind of get into it, talk to people that are
building it, and what it's about, and how it came about
and all that, it's unbelievably clever.
DANIEL STRANGE: There were some moments, where, you know,
it's a complicated shoot.
Like you've got this costume flying onto him backwards.
And we had to have like 20 people rigging it.
And there were a lot of ways it could have gone wrong.
And the tension level's very high.
Like is this going to work?
And Aaron Douglas did a great job, I thought, of keeping
things loose by making jokes and letting people know that
like, hey, we're here to have fun.
ADAM (OFFSCREEN): They can go as fast as they want.
Like if someone like is close to having a heart attack, they
go speed a million.
JOHN SIMS: Adam says that the fire trucks go speed a
million, which I can only--
a million miles an hour.
I don't really know what speed a million is.
Inside they're these like spaceships.
You have controls and anonymous blinking lights and
levers and like the Millennium Falcon or like
those pods from 2001.
So he comes on the set, and we have that set all set up, with
the control panels.
But then there's these firemen with helmets on.
And he's really confused, he was like, where are they?
Well, they're--
they're in the fire truck.
They're going to the guy who's having a heart attack.
He's like--
why are they--
this looks like a spaceship.
I'm like, well, yeah, it does look like a spaceship, but you
said they go speed a million, and if they were on a road,
they'd hit people.
He was really serious, and he was giving me
really serious notes.
And he kind of like--
really kind of like considers my argument.
And he's like, OK.
The other thing I was trying to do is make the world way
bigger than what Adam was saying, almost like what we're
getting from Adam is just the tip of the iceberg.
Fire City ends five billion years in the future, where the
sun has become a red giant and is consuming the Earth, and
Tychseria is the last person alive.
He's having to deal with the hubris
of becoming an immortal.
AARON DOUGLAS: My episode's going to be the best.
And if you don't like it, go frak yourself.
