How Movie Studios Make Vancouver Look Like Any City in the World

Vancouver is as much a film town as Los Angeles or New York, but you’d never know it. Despite the fact that a huge number of movies are filmed there, they're never set there. It’s one of the largest cities for film production in North America, in part thanks to hefty tax incentives for filming in the area, and studios are expert at disguising the British Columbian port as locales as diverse as Shanghai, Boston, Santa Barbara, and post-apocalyptic worlds. (Toronto, another titan of film production, is often similarly disguised.) 

Every Frame a Painting, a video series analyzing film,  details the clever cuts, green-screen editing, and establishing shots that allow Vancouver to take on the identity of virtually any city in the world. Next time you go to the movies, see if you can spot popular movie backdrops like the University of British Columbia or the British Columbia Institute of Technology’s aerospace campus.

[h/t: Open Culture]

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