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Why Vancouver is always a stand-in for San Francisco in movies and TV shows (2021)
- auslegung 4mo agoOne of my favorite YouTube channels, Every Frame a Painting, has a video on this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ojm74VGsZBU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ojm74VGsZBU
- jbl0ndie 3mo agoThe city that never plays itself, a classic episode
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- beembeem 3mo ago...and Seattle
- CapitalistCartr 3mo agoAnd Toronto is New York City.
- m-ee 3mo ago“Come with me to Canada. Toronto is just like New York, but without all the stuff”- Steve Martin on 30 Rock
- mikrl 3mo agoAh yes, American Psycho was shot in Toronto wasn’t it?
- Insanity 3mo agoIt was! Downtown near the financial district.
- fanatic2pope 3mo agoExcept for that one hit movie (Rumble in the Bronx) when Vancouver stood in for New York. https://imgur.com/a/jr1KARI https://imgur.com/a/jr1KARI
- dreamcompiler 3mo agoI thought it was funny that almost every alien planet on Stargate SG-1 looked like British Columbia.
- chorizo 3mo agoAnd the advanced planets looked like the SFU campus.
- clickety_clack 3mo agoThey called one of the planets “Kelowna”, a town in BC a few hundred km away.
- mc32 3mo agoNah, you can tell because they don’t have annoying people paint street numbers on the curbs. That said it’d be difficult to film the film Bullitt in Vancouver unless they cut out a lot of the street scenes, the marina, San Bruno mountain, the old freeways…
- comrade1234 3mo agoThe painting address numbers on curbs was a widespread scam in San Francisco. Grifters scammed homeowners into doing it.
- antonymoose 3mo agoWhat was the scam exactly? I thought curb numbers were a thing people actually had from the movies!
- AlotOfReading 3mo agoThey're definitely a thing. The scam is people showing up and painting them without approval, demanding payment afterwards.
- antonymoose 3mo agoAh - the closest thing I’ve heard of is the “pine straw” scam. Some landscapers firm pulls up to a cut-de-sac and tells a homeowner they have 20-30 bales of pine straw from a big job and asks if they’d like their beds re-done at a reduced bulk-rate. They then proceed to do the work and bill an exorbitant rate per bale and or inflate the total number of bales, e.g. that 20 bale leftover load is magically now 120 bales.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- fragmede 3mo agoThat's extortion, not a scam. Still bad, but different word.
- carabiner 3mo agoTax breaks for filming and it's not SF specific or even cities. Other planets too, like Stargate SG-1 being filmed around Squamish 1 hour away.
- dylan604 3mo agoShooting on location halfway across the galaxy definitely seems like it would strain the union's rate schedule. If you can take a Stargate so that you could be back home on the same day so you only have to pay local rates would be amazing.
- zulux 3mo agoThe moon landings were faked, and Stanley Kubrick directed them. Annoyingly, he insisted on filming on location.
- ecshafer 3mo agoIts really amazing how most planets in the galaxy look exactly like the Pacific northwest.
- chorizo 3mo agoAs someone who lives in Vancouver, that’s a huge relief. I won’t have to adapt to new biomes once we go offworld.
- expedition32 3mo agoHaving a street shut down for filming in New York or San Francisco is probably beyond the budget of most directors.
- wolvoleo 3mo agoA lot of shows were recorded in New York though like person of interest, Mr Robot and many more
- vincent-manis 3mo ago
- topkai22 3mo agoPsych (the TV show) was set in Santa Barbara but filmed in Vancouver. They then did an episode where the plot was that characters all took a trip to British Columbia, which I recall being amusingly meta.
- tecoholic 3mo agoWow. With all the beach, pier and flyby shots, as a non-American, I really thought it was all shot in Santa Barbara. Man. What editing can do.
- ecshafer 3mo agoBeach, pier and flyby shots might be done with a combination of stock footage, or a single day shoot for filler. Theres a term for it, not sure what it is.
- __s 3mo agoB-roll
- tomega2134 3mo agoThe most recognizable building would be the one their office was set in, which is actually the White Rock Museum & Archives building (a former train station) in White Rock, near the pier.
- 3eb7988a1663 3mo agoI noticed more than one scene where it was actually raining, but they digitally edited it out (as best they could on a TV budget). I always thought it was weird for a place with such perfect weather that they could not delay shooting by a day.
- aaronharnly 3mo agoIt’s a great show. But yeah if look closely, those shoreline shots have rockier beaches and more evergreens lining the shore than should really be the case in Santa Barbara :)
- thought_alarm 3mo agoOr in the case of Superbad, a film based on Seth Rogen's experiences as a Vancouver teenager in the late 90s, Vancouver is a stand-in for Los Angeles, which is a stand-in for Vancouver.
- mistyvales 3mo agoYou can also tell if something was shot in Canada by all the Canadian actors all over the place. I recognize so many people from X-Files, and so many other shows.
- AIorNot 3mo agoAlso Battlestar Galactica -multiple shots of homes in Vancouver- I remember watching the series and wondering what city was being used for Baltar's house and surroundings because it was so beautiful, futuristic and clean..then I went vistied Vancouver.. its truly a gorgeous city and area http://www.battlestarlocations.com/locations-guide/the-miniseries-baltars-house http://www.battlestarlocations.com/locations-guide/the-minis...
- pkaler 3mo agoMy mother worked in a factory that sewed drapes for film sets before she retired. My brother-in-law used to be an operations manager for a warehouse that rented equipment to film sets. There is just a very long tail of services and a robust supply chain that is required for most industries to be successful.
- buildbot 3mo agoIt was very fun to attend UBC then immediately start recognizing bits of the campus in many TV shows - Man in High Castle, Stargate, Battlestar, and many others. They have long since fixed it but there used to be an absolutely awful/hilarious set of street view captures for UBC that were taken by accident during filming for Man in the High Castle…the entire main mall had Nazi flags up. https://ubyssey.ca/humour/ubc-nazi-territory-street-view/ https://ubyssey.ca/humour/ubc-nazi-territory-street-view/
- justinhj 3mo agoSame for SFU students too especially the mountain top Burnaby campus.
- cf100clunk 3mo agoSFU's Burnaby campus was hugely present in the X-Files years shot in Canada. The brutalist architecture of Arthur Erickson and Geoffrey Massey lent itself perfectly to the scifi-noir vibe.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- dzonga 3mo agothe non politically correct answer - Vancouver allows you to sell the dream of a wonderful city, clean streets etc.
- lwansbrough 3mo agoLike SF, you can pick streets in Vancouver and sell whatever story you want about the city. You won't find many film cameras on East Hastings unless it's a documentary.
- nianderwallace 3mo agoThe utility poles in alleys are my signal that the video is shot in Vancouver. I haven't seen many other cities with such utility poles. see https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vancouver_BC_alley_and_utility_poles.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vancouver_BC_alley_a...
- sandcat_ 3mo agoVancouver always feels like Cities Skyline or SimCity to me, in a good way. That point where you’ve maxed everything out and there’s all sorts going on. You turn a corner and you see a seaplane landing, people cycling, rowing, running, doing yoga in the park, boats going past, etc, etc. Then another corner and you see the mountains, ski resorts with the lights twinkling. In one direction there’s skyscrapers but in another, quaint colourful houses. I love it here.
- sandspar 3mo agoI agree! Vancouver has lots of stuff going on. It's a particularly great city to see different kinds of transport. Bikes, cars, trains, subways, float planes, yachts, sailboats, passenger jets.
- expedition32 3mo agoThe alien planet is always a Canadian forest!