There is a new commercial for Toyota Camry showing a “professional driver on a closed course” doing donuts on an empty metropolitan expressway before getting of his car (MY CAR = CAMRY) and doing pavement angels. And I’ve noticed lately that this empty expressway is becoming a common setting for commercials as of late (another is the jeans commercial with the stampeding buffalo, and I believe I‘ve seen other car commercials of this ilk). And, of course, this same empty metropolitan expressway has made numerous cameos in apocalyptic movies.
Prior to this recent onslaught, I’ve always naively assumed that studios just sort of leased major expressways from cities for a day or two, kicked everyone off, and filmed what they needed to film. But then the idea occurred to me that maybe this is just one giant studio lot with expressways built just for this purpose. It seems to me that would be the more cost-efficient approach (I am assuming, possibly incorrectly, that blocking off large portions of LA freeways would be quite costly).
So what’s the deal? Is there a major expressway studio lot somewhere just outside of LA that studios use to film these empty expressway shots? Or do the studios that film such movies and commercials actually pay metropolitan communities to lease the freeways overnight or early Sunday morning?
I recall that commercial-looks to be shot in broad daylight in downtown LA. No way the roads were cleared. Must have been by computer. AFAIK, no “Freeway sets” anywhere. At least none that big.
They built a section of freeway for the chase scene in the Matrix Reloaded. It has walls next to it probably so you would not notice they kept driving by the same section over and over.
Often productions use expressways that are closed for construction, or are new & haven’t been opened yet. The highway scenes from Speed were filmed on L.A.'s Century Freeway (the 105) before it was opened to traffic…
I read that this movie coming out soon called “28 Days” which has a kind of end of the world scenario with this virus that makes people go into some weird kind of rage, had a really low budget and that while they were making it they had to wait for people to clear off the roads in england because they had no permission to “take them over” for the film
I thought about this when I saw The Langoliers on TV a few years ago There are shots in this movie where the freeways are completely empty, not to mention the fact that there are no people around, either. I sampled a few sites referenced from Google but I didn’t see anything that explained how they actually did these scenes.
Or they could do what the producers of 405 The Movie did: clamp a camera to a bridge over the freeway, and take lots of high-speed pictures of the moving traffic. Since both the cars and the empty road around them are in different places in each picture, after a time the camera has taken a picture of unobstructed road from every part of the freeway. Then you go through the pictures with Photoshop and add all the bits of empty road together into a new image, yielding a picture of an empty freeway.
If you also know the dimensions of the freeway, you can then reproduce its dimensions in a scene in your 3D animation software, digitally animate your own cars in the scene, and put the animation ‘on top of’ your carefully-prepared background picture…
I was driving to work early on a Sunday morning on I-405 east of Seattle. Just north of Bellevue me and the few other cars were detoured off the freeway and let back on at the next on ramp. While driving next to the closed freeway, I saw what appeared to be a movie crew at work. It turned out to be a crew from the show Frasier shooting visuals for the TV show.
We’ve had a new 4 lane inland highway built in our neck of the woods and there have been two maybe even three IIRC shutdowns for movies. The last one interupted my commute for at least a week. That was a movie to be called Final Destinations , filmed last spring and I don’t even know if it is out yet.
Ever been to downtown L.A. on a Sunday morning? It’s a ghost town. Basically, what a production company will do is buy a permit from the city. They’ll specify that they need a certain location for a certain amount of time. The parameters will be spelled out on the permit. Then they’ll close off the access to the area and guard them with rent-a-cops, hired off-duty cops, or cops provided by the city under a contract.
Sony Studios is right down the street from me. All around the area you can frequently see film units. But my impression is that other parts of the city are used more often. From what I understand, there are neighbourhoods that are used as sets so often that it really riles the inhabitants.
I’ve only happened on a closed freeway once. I was heading to L.A. from Lancaster and a section of the Antelope Valley Freeway (California 14) was closed. Even though it was getting close to summer, they needed a winter scene and had the area covered with fake snow. Traffic was rerouted to Sierra Highway so that the crew had the six lanes to themselves
