If your hometown has ever been used as both a location and stand-in for some other place, you know that watching the film — watching for familiar sights, watching for incongruities — can prove a bewildering experience, sometimes enough to take you out completely. I can’t even imagine how film- and TV-loving types of Vancouver handle this whiplash on a regular basis. Does the city seem foreign to you? Think again. Having acted as everywhere in the United States — from New York City to Alaska to San Francisco to upscale Connecticut — and more or less never as itself, it’s perhaps the most malleable filming location in the world.
Tony Zhou‘s latest video essay breaks down the onscreen manipulation of his native city, a “ubiquitous and invisible” place that’s changed with the simplest of means. A big part of this piece is illustrating how the most basic tools — props (USA Today!), angles, lighting, composites — make one place look like another, or how decent screenwriting will allow, say, a college campus (SFU) to pass as a military base or factory. By essay’s end, he implores filmmaking-inclined Vancouver citizens to represent their home in its proper form; given the persuasiveness of his argument, it’s not unlikely that such a thing will eventually happen.
Have a look below: