Vancouver is everywhere, everywhere is Vancouver
This post is for Aaron Peck.
Rule of thumb: If your TV series has more than 5 sequences of stock footage per episode, it was most likely filmed in Vancouver.
Case in point: Fairly Legal on USA Network (the pilot was free on iTunes; it seems that many pilots from USA Network were made available on iTunes).
Said pilot seemed rather promising. The office of the main character are located in what seemed to be the Wells Fargo building on Sutter and Market; coffee with brother on Union Square; shot of the main character on Columbus and Kearny, walking to her office, with a view of the Transamerica Tower and the Zoetrope building in the background (meaning the protagonist has no sense of orientation, since her office is the other way around); protagonist riding the ferry to Sausalito, the Ferry Building in the back.
There are geographical inconsistencies, of course. One has already been mentioned. The protagonist also seems to live in a British Columbia version of either Fort Mason or Sausalito (from the proximity of the Golden Gate Bridge, obviously added with Adobe After Effects or Final Cut Pro). There are too many fir trees. There are fir trees around.
(Rule number 2 of TV series: If your TV series shows more than 3 tourist sites per episode, it was probably shot in Vancouver)
Episode 2 went cheap and offered this shot of Bernal Heights:
Except that there are no hills around or indication of hills, and there are no buildings with less than two stories in Bernal Heights. Not to mention that Bernal Heights is a densely populated neighborhood.
And the scenes in the Financial District? Yup, that's Granville:
Also note the wide sidewalks:
This is all fairly innocuous stuff. It's not as bad as this recent episode of Human Target where a hostage situation takes place at the San Francisco Opera. The building itself has a neoclassical style:
But the exterior shots are of a red-brick building, closer looking to the SFMoMA. Not to mention the ludicrous plot where the hostage takers chose the Opera (located next to City Hall) to dig a tunnel to a CIA safe house located on Kearny St, the address given placing it between City Lights Books and the Zoetrope building (you may want to Google-map it for distances and other topographical difficulties).
This is not a rant against filming in Vancouver. There are many reasons why things cannot be filmed on location, although it does occur from time to time (Trauma was filmed entirely in San Francisco and a couple of months ago, I had to take the long way to my bus stop because scenes from Rise of the Apes were shot on my street). And we are talking about mass entertainment, where verisimilitude is not really a concern.
During his last visit to San Francisco, Aaron Peck remarked that it would become more difficult for Vancouver because the recent Olympics would make the city more recognizable. Karen Hannah recently mentioned in one of her Feedbag posts the Cittaslow movement. One of the stated goals of this movement is to "resist the homogenization and globalization of towns around the globe". Both statements make me skeptical. Even when people state an interest in architecture, I don't see them notice architecture as such, which goes beyond the features of a building.
Architect Bernard Tschumi somewhere wrote of architecture as "the organization of space" along an "urban program". In this sense, the San Francisco Main Library, designed by the firm of Cathy Simon (SWVM), is successful in that it is in dialogue with the surrounding buildings (the Asian Art Museum, the Opera House, the San Francisco Municipal Court, ...) while looking modern. With its open-ness and windowed foof, it also speaks of a public space, more than a dusty library.
During his visit last year, Daniel Canty had remarked upon the relative homogeneity of San Francisco's residential neighborhoods (Hayes Valley, the Mission, North Beach, Noe Valley) compared to Montréal, where every neighborhood will change based on whether they were historically Anglophone (Outremont) or Francophone, whether they were a recent addition to the city (during my visit to Montréal, Daniel stated that Verdun was not "true Montréal"; it has only been part of the city for the past 10 years or so). Not to mention whether the neighborhood was a blue-collar neighborhood (Meyerland) or not (Le Plateau).
Meanwhile, most of San Francisco's residential neighborhoods have been historically working class, even the gentrified ones (which is why the homogeneity mentioned by Daniel does not exist in the Presidio). Sure, like Montréal, the neighborhoods have been divided along ethnic and socio-economic lines (the Mission, Chinatown). But those occupants received those neighborhoods second-hand and the characteristics that define those spaces are merely decorative (the murals of the Mission, the Chinese decorations of Chinatown, the mall in Japantown). But there is always something San Franciscan to them.
This post was not written in Vancouver.
UPDATE 2/7/11 10:37AM: I guess I should also mention how the BBC has used Cardiff, Wales, as a stand-in for 1930s Manhattan in the Tenth Doctor's "Daleks in Manhattan" and "Evolution of the Daleks."
Rule of thumb: If your TV series has more than 5 sequences of stock footage per episode, it was most likely filmed in Vancouver.
Case in point: Fairly Legal on USA Network (the pilot was free on iTunes; it seems that many pilots from USA Network were made available on iTunes).
Said pilot seemed rather promising. The office of the main character are located in what seemed to be the Wells Fargo building on Sutter and Market; coffee with brother on Union Square; shot of the main character on Columbus and Kearny, walking to her office, with a view of the Transamerica Tower and the Zoetrope building in the background (meaning the protagonist has no sense of orientation, since her office is the other way around); protagonist riding the ferry to Sausalito, the Ferry Building in the back.
There are geographical inconsistencies, of course. One has already been mentioned. The protagonist also seems to live in a British Columbia version of either Fort Mason or Sausalito (from the proximity of the Golden Gate Bridge, obviously added with Adobe After Effects or Final Cut Pro). There are too many fir trees. There are fir trees around.
(Rule number 2 of TV series: If your TV series shows more than 3 tourist sites per episode, it was probably shot in Vancouver)
Episode 2 went cheap and offered this shot of Bernal Heights:
Except that there are no hills around or indication of hills, and there are no buildings with less than two stories in Bernal Heights. Not to mention that Bernal Heights is a densely populated neighborhood.
And the scenes in the Financial District? Yup, that's Granville:
Also note the wide sidewalks:
This is all fairly innocuous stuff. It's not as bad as this recent episode of Human Target where a hostage situation takes place at the San Francisco Opera. The building itself has a neoclassical style:
But the exterior shots are of a red-brick building, closer looking to the SFMoMA. Not to mention the ludicrous plot where the hostage takers chose the Opera (located next to City Hall) to dig a tunnel to a CIA safe house located on Kearny St, the address given placing it between City Lights Books and the Zoetrope building (you may want to Google-map it for distances and other topographical difficulties).
This is not a rant against filming in Vancouver. There are many reasons why things cannot be filmed on location, although it does occur from time to time (Trauma was filmed entirely in San Francisco and a couple of months ago, I had to take the long way to my bus stop because scenes from Rise of the Apes were shot on my street). And we are talking about mass entertainment, where verisimilitude is not really a concern.
During his last visit to San Francisco, Aaron Peck remarked that it would become more difficult for Vancouver because the recent Olympics would make the city more recognizable. Karen Hannah recently mentioned in one of her Feedbag posts the Cittaslow movement. One of the stated goals of this movement is to "resist the homogenization and globalization of towns around the globe". Both statements make me skeptical. Even when people state an interest in architecture, I don't see them notice architecture as such, which goes beyond the features of a building.
Architect Bernard Tschumi somewhere wrote of architecture as "the organization of space" along an "urban program". In this sense, the San Francisco Main Library, designed by the firm of Cathy Simon (SWVM), is successful in that it is in dialogue with the surrounding buildings (the Asian Art Museum, the Opera House, the San Francisco Municipal Court, ...) while looking modern. With its open-ness and windowed foof, it also speaks of a public space, more than a dusty library.
During his visit last year, Daniel Canty had remarked upon the relative homogeneity of San Francisco's residential neighborhoods (Hayes Valley, the Mission, North Beach, Noe Valley) compared to Montréal, where every neighborhood will change based on whether they were historically Anglophone (Outremont) or Francophone, whether they were a recent addition to the city (during my visit to Montréal, Daniel stated that Verdun was not "true Montréal"; it has only been part of the city for the past 10 years or so). Not to mention whether the neighborhood was a blue-collar neighborhood (Meyerland) or not (Le Plateau).
Meanwhile, most of San Francisco's residential neighborhoods have been historically working class, even the gentrified ones (which is why the homogeneity mentioned by Daniel does not exist in the Presidio). Sure, like Montréal, the neighborhoods have been divided along ethnic and socio-economic lines (the Mission, Chinatown). But those occupants received those neighborhoods second-hand and the characteristics that define those spaces are merely decorative (the murals of the Mission, the Chinese decorations of Chinatown, the mall in Japantown). But there is always something San Franciscan to them.
This post was not written in Vancouver.
UPDATE 2/7/11 10:37AM: I guess I should also mention how the BBC has used Cardiff, Wales, as a stand-in for 1930s Manhattan in the Tenth Doctor's "Daleks in Manhattan" and "Evolution of the Daleks."
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