Why Vancouver is always a stand-in for San Francisco in movies and TV shows (2021)
sfgate.comVancouver 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.
I 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.
One of my favorite YouTube channels, Every Frame a Painting, has a video on this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ojm74VGsZBU
The city that never plays itself, a classic episode
Psych (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.
Wow. 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.
Beach, 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.
B-roll
The 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.
I 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.
It’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 :)
Same thing happens in Ice Cube's "Are We There Yet" where the characters are driving from Portland to Vancouver but the whole movie is filmed in Vancouver and surrounding area.
My 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.
Or 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.
You 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.
Swear I recognized location/trees from TV show The Magicians in the latest adaptation of Shogun(standing in for Japan).
The forest scenes in shogun were filmed in Squamish, around some very popular climbing areas. You can even see chalk on some of the boulders.
Tax 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.
I always got a chuckle when Stargate went meta. They had a planet called Kelowna (a real BC city) and a country called Langara (I was for a time a faculty member at Langara College). At one point, they visit an Oregon town called Steveston, with the location being the Steveston district of Richmond BC.
Of course, nothing can beat the thrill of waking up every morning and looking out my bedroom building at the office building that was taken over by an evil computer on X-Files.
Its really amazing how most planets in the galaxy look exactly like the Pacific northwest.
As someone who lives in Vancouver, that’s a huge relief. I won’t have to adapt to new biomes once we go offworld.
Shooting 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.
The moon landings were faked, and Stanley Kubrick directed them. Annoyingly, he insisted on filming on location.
Having a street shut down for filming in New York or San Francisco is probably beyond the budget of most directors.
A lot of shows were recorded in New York though like person of interest, Mr Robot and many more
And Toronto is New York City.
“Come with me to Canada. Toronto is just like New York, but without all the stuff”- Steve Martin on 30 Rock
Ah yes, American Psycho was shot in Toronto wasn’t it?
It was! Downtown near the financial district.
I thought it was funny that almost every alien planet on Stargate SG-1 looked like British Columbia.
They called one of the planets “Kelowna”, a town in BC a few hundred km away.
And the advanced planets looked like the SFU campus.
Also 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-minis...
Every time I visit the library it feels like I'm in New Caprica.
Thanks for this. Just started another rewatch and were of course in awe of the house.
the non politically correct answer - Vancouver allows you to sell the dream of a wonderful city, clean streets etc.
Like 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.
The 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_a...
It 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/
Same for SFU students too especially the mountain top Burnaby campus.
Nah, 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…
The painting address numbers on curbs was a widespread scam in San Francisco. Grifters scammed homeowners into doing it.
What was the scam exactly? I thought curb numbers were a thing people actually had from the movies!
They're definitely a thing. The scam is people showing up and painting them without approval, demanding payment afterwards.
That's extortion, not a scam. Still bad, but different word.
The alien planet is always a Canadian forest!
...and Seattle