For the exterior, while Shell was willing to lend an abandoned tanker to the production, the elevated insurance and safety risks caused it to be replaced with miniatures built by Derek Meddings' team and shot in the Bahamas.
The moving, miniature world built on 44th Street near Times Square opened on schedule in April.
It finally struck me, as I explored the miniature city built to house the 4,200 athletes who make up these Paralympics, that it was really here.
As it leaves, however, a miniature accelerometer built into it detects the retraction and passes this information along an optical fibre to a computer.
Luminarias are miniature bonfires built in courtyards and at the entrances to driveways where they extend wordless season's greetings to passersby.
The miniature White House, built on a scale of one foot to one inch, contains fully functioning electric lights, television sets, ringing telephones and smoking chimneys.
Built in 1948 as a roadside attraction, it almost disappeared, but was luckily purchased by a couple who have been slowly restoring the three-acre miniature world built from mortar and stone.
Instead, it was Jane Forbes Clark, chairwoman of the Hall of Fame, who staged a celebration at the lodge behind Kingfisher Tower, a miniature castle built on Otsego Lake in the 19th century by Edward Clark, her great-great-grandfather.
The narrative, on the other hand, is gratifyingly messy, as Roddy, washed up in a miniature London built out of trash and flotsam beneath the actual city, becomes embroiled in some fairly complicated intrigue.
Some of the fancy kit on Philae was British, such as the miniature laboratory built at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory near Oxford to a design from the Open University.This outsized contribution to the Rosetta mission is now typical of Britain's place in the firmament of satellite construction.
But the sheik's ambitions were never so small: within a few years the proposed site of the project, Saadiyat Island, a 10-square-mile development zone just north of Abu Dhabi's urban center, was being planned as a miniature city built around culture and leisure, with some of the most recognizable names from the creative world.
