One of the most common techniques for producing a virtual place for the medium of film is to shoot the film in an already existing physical place. In cinematic terminology, this is called filming ‘on location’. If we follow The Virtual Space Theory’s principle of distinguishing phenomena from techniques, however, we will discover that knowing where the camera was rolling does not necessarily tell us much about the nature of the virtual place which was created as a result.
Let’s start with straightforward cases first. The music video for the song Style, which was mentioned in the previous post, was clearly filmed on location: One of its ways of conveying its rock-star style was indeed to film it in stylish places designed by contemporary star architects. Similarly, though with a completely different attitude, the film Der Himmel über Berlin (or in its English-language title, Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders, 1987) was also filmed on location in the city of Berlin, before the fall of the wall. As mentioned in the book, the story of this film may be fictional, but the virtual place of the city of Berlin as presented in it clearly reflects the physical city in which it was shot, as it was at that time.
In sharp contrast, another film which was shot in the city of Berlin is the film Æon Flux (Karyn Kusama, 2005). Even though this film ended up disappointing many fans of Peter Chung’s original animated TV series which inspired it, the result nevertheless remains an interesting one from a design point of view. The story it tells takes place in ‘the last city’ in a post-apocalyptic Earth several centuries in the future. For the creation of this virtual place the filmmakers chose to film it mostly on location in a series of specifically selected sites in the city of Berlin. Yet when shown together in the film, it resulted in the creation of a virtual place that is not Berlin at all.
Some examples of filming locations which can be seen in this film trailer are the House of World Cultures by Hugh Stubbins Jr., the Spandau Lake Bridge by Walter A. Noebel, and the Mexican Embassy by Teodoro Gonzaléz de Léon and Francisco Serrano Cacho. A list of filming locations is available here.
Another example of a film which was shot on location yet resulted in a virtual world that is very different from the physical places in which it was made is the film The Fall (Tarsem, 2006). This film revolves around a story which is told by a man to a little girl, and what is shown in the film is the mental vision which the girl generates out of her storyteller’s words.
To create this virtual world, the filmmaker carefully selected numerous beautiful places from 28 countries all over the globe as his filming locations, which were then filmed over the course of 4 years. A list of these filming locations is available here. And yet, the way these places are presented together creates a separate virtual world of its own which is clearly distinct from our world and any of the physical locations it was actually filmed in.
