I can’t describe the weirdness of seeing a place or setting on TV that I’m very familiar with. Other newscasts and such seem more movielike when it’s filmed in places I’ve never been to.
Kind of a movie vs. home video difference.
I’m curious about if people from New York or Los Angeles or other common movie locations also have this strange “connected disconnect.”
People in New York are used to seeing familiar locations on tv and in the movies. It’s no big deal.
I think it depends on the context, and the type of location.
Sometimes it’s a little jarring to see something that’s familiar to the point of banality represented as something relatively exotic, For example, seeing the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library in Battlestar Galactica’s "Cylon Occupied Caprica"was deeply weird and distracting – more so than seeing a tourist area in downtown Vancouver represent part of a small town in Alaska.
I hope that folks in LA or New York experience a little less of this dissonance because of more careful selection of locations.
I live in LA and I absolutely love to play the “Hey, I’ve seen that/been there!” game when watching TV/film.
The Office, one of my favorite shows, is actually filmed in the city of Van Nuys, where I live. In the DVD commentaries they even mention some very specific roads and locations that I have driven down/by a hundred times. Makes me all tingly.
I attended USC and it too is often used as a filming location. I’ve seen it in commercials, TV series, and some crappy movies. (and when I was there film crews on campus were a pretty commonplace sight)
I recently learned a park near my house where I like to visit was frequently used for filming in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Of course the list goes on. Very neat to live here, IMO.
I know what you mean. In the movie Shallow Hal they went to a pizza joint that I used to frequent shortly before it came out, and in Little Miss Sunshine they drove right past the theatre we were sitting in! No big deal to a NY or LA native, sure, but I thought it was cool.
I was on the news last year. They interviewed me at my local comic book shop when Captain America died. I still have it saved on my DVR :p.
My jr. high school was on the news twice in the same year while I was there. Once because someone brought a bunch of pills to school (turned out to be caffeine pills :rolleyes:) and they made a huge deal out of it, ambulance came, couple kids got their stomachs pumped.
The other time it was because a girl rode her horse to school. They came a did a feel-good “the old ways aren’t dead” type of story, but she told me why she did it and it wasn’t so nice. I happened to be talking to the asst. principal when she rode up, so we went outside to meet her. She said she missed the bus and her parents told her she better find her own way to school or they would “knock her teeth down her throat.”
Ok, so those are two weird stories that might not have been 100% necessary but I haven’t gotten to tell them in a long time, and they kinda sorta fit the OP :).
And yes, it was very weird seeing my school on the news, especially since it was so far from the big city where the station was based.
Seeing Gori in the Republic of Georgia on television after the Russian attack was disturbing… I have walked down those streets many times.
I’ve got a couple of similar ones. I was in Zagreb when it was still part of Yugoslavia (just). After a memorable night out I ended up sleeping on a park bench overlooking the town. Three months later, back in the UK, I saw the same bench on the news. It was beside an artillery emplacement.
I also know Harare pretty well, so I often recognise it on the news.
I’m sure you’ve all seen reporters in front of the Capitol in DC. You may not know that there’s this little patio-looking thingy where they stand, I assume put there for that purpose. Anyway, whenever I see the reporter-in-front-of-the-Capitol shot, I can tell when it’s from that little patio.
I was watching the News once and they had a story about a retaining wall that had collapsed onto some parked cars. And I thought it looked a little familiar.
Then they showed a wide shot, and I realised it was on my own street corner, about three houses up from me.
L.A. is used a lot in movies, but maybe not quite as much as NYC, in my opinion
I see my high school quite a lot in movies, and obviously a lot of movie producers use locations in L.A. The County Museum of Natural History is classic and archetypical “Museum Building” that has been used to stand in for the Met and other institutions on the east coast when the producers didn’t feel like spending the money to do an authentic location shoot.
If you see your neighborhood on the news very often, it’s probably not a good thing. This is not a high-crime area, but I did once turn on the early morning news and see a report about a police car chase that was winding up as they passed through my neighborhood. I could hear the choppers and the sirens outside, and on the TV.
I spent most of the latest Batman film going “hey, there’s _____” since it was filmed in Chicago. Lovely cinematography but very distracting.
I once watched a scene from an episode of the British cop show The Bill which was filmed inside the store from where I purchased the TV set I was watching it on. Weired
