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Ok, I didn't take behind-the-scenes pics of these sets, but it's simple enough to describe and they wouldn't have been all that interesting.

For the Doctor/Boe/Hame half:

If it's not obvious, the set consists of three pieces of glossy white foamcore for the floor and the two walls, with the windows cut out of the one in the back. Then an image of New New York taken from screenshots is printed on two letter-sized sheets, portrait, and taped together to make the exterior backdrop.

The New New York backdrop is taped up behind the windowed foamcore wall, with about a 6-inch gap between them. That gap allows for an LED flashlight aimed at the New New York backdrop to also shine in through the windows, adding to the realism and making the light patterns on the floor and wall. Then a very soft, diffuse LED light is aimed at the figures to light them from the front, as little as I could get away with and still keep the look of the episode. And that's it.

For the Rose/Cassandra/Chip half:

Obviously what I did with Cassandra is my very first and simple endeavor of toy modification--taking the Cassandra skin from my redundant S1 Cassandra and gluing it into place on the S2 Destroyed Cassandra frame. If anyone's tried this, you quickly discover they're not an exact match, but what I did there was as close as I could get to something reasonable without doing any cutting or other intense modifications to the toys.

For the basement set: I searched online through endless photos of decayed walls taken straight-on. These were usually from people posting photos for insurance claims purposes, or perhaps manufacturers of restorative paint, and other industrial sites and home improvement blogs and the like. I always use reference material from the episodes like behind-the-scenes photos of sets and location--and of course studying the scenes in the episodes closely. Here I just kept looking until I found a photo of a decaying wall that, as you noticed, really uncannily matches the walls of the location in the episode very closely. Jackpot! Then, that was of course just printed on photo paper--one letter-sized sheet--and taped up on the back of the set. The same photo was used for the floor as well.

I noticed from the episode that there were steps in front of the raised platform Cassandra was on, and these were just wood, painted black. I happened to have some black wooden picture frames, and was able to just make those into the platform, stacking them in a staggered way to make the steps. In the episode there were three steps and I took the license of having two, because I didn't like the composition when the platform was higher using three. I actually did originally have the ladder that was behind Cassandra in the episode which they climb up after she's destroyed, but compositionally it was too much business around Cassandra, and this is another of those cases where I compromised accuracy to the episode to get a better photo composition. Details like Rose holding the metal thingie for a weapon perhaps make up for things like that.

The sort of structural piping on the right just to give a touch of detail is actually a PS3 accessory I thought worked well--a little stand to hold the PSEye webcam to read the cards for the game "Eye of Judgment". Also, obviously in that photo I did remove the joints from Chip's legs, because I couldn't cover them with cleverly-placed shadow as I did for Rose without making things too dark.

The light for that one is simpler than usual--a single bright LED flashilight with a soft filter coming straight from the top against the back wall as in the episode, and minimal ambient light in the room (unusual for my pics) just to give some amber color where there would have been shadows that were too "stark".

Alright, there's the text-only BTS for this one.