Where do they shoot the short indoor scenes for movies/tv series?
 

Hi!

So while watching Breaking Bad the question popped up in my mind.. where do they shoot the 1-2 minute long indoor (restaurant/bar) scenes? (someone reading newspaper, or making a phone call) We are talking about the locations which aren't repeating.
Do they rent out a bar for a hour or do they have studios built for all that?

All of the above.

You only need a location shoot if you want one in Hollywood because all the studios are like a city with endless props.

They are rented as needed,the local restaurant gets more in rental than sales

Hell they probably don't even pay for it just sell it off as.. "Hey you can claim your restaurant was in the movie".

I saw a post on Reddit the other day about how the movie industry gets their wardrobes for free by going to high end stores buying a bunch of shit then taking it all back before the 30 days is up. Obviously they don't do it for everything but apparently it's common enough.

Normally they will just rent the place for as long as they need to shoot the scene. If it is outdoors in public, like walking down a sidewalk, talking on a payphone etc then they will get a permit from the city and if they have to block streets or stop traffic etc they will need to pay the city in order to do that.

They shut down a major arterie to downtown for a week here,must have cost a few million.cities,owners pimp it for the loot

Yeah that one I'm actually aware of (saw many work in progress photos with closed down streets for Fringe etc).. but didn't knew what was the case for bars/coffee shops etc

Thanks for the replies :)

Yep. They talked about some of that on the studios tours. When I was in California on a few different trips, I took the studio tours (Sony, Warner Bros, Universal, etc). They talk about a lot of the different things they do for props and what not for different movies/scenes/needs.

I remember Michael Mann talking in some interview about in "Heat", where they shut down downtown L.A. for that shoot out/bank scenes. He said, that they had a specific time window on Sunday mornings/weekend to complete that whole shoot out sequence and they had to do it over a period of month(s).

My guess is they do something similar most of the time. I doubt they can shut down a major artery of a city for a weeks/months at a time, regardless of what they pay in permits. You have a lot of local businesses caught in the middle of any road closings.

That happens more often than not. I found it amazing what these multi-billion dollar companies get for cheap or next to nothing. The same in radio. You have these monoliths making billions, run by $5/hour or minimum wage disk jockeys.

:disgust

House Rental
 

My aunt & uncle have a cool house in L.A.
A scout came by one day and asked to see the interior. 2 days later a FEDEX envelope arrived with a contract. They agreed to some furniture had to be moved to a different room, walls painted white for lighting, and they vacated for 3 days. Got paid $10,000.
It was that short-lived cable show Fastlane.

These days it is often not even a human running the station. A company that owns a bunch of stations across the nation will hire one DJ to pre-record intros to some track, commercials etc for all of their markets then they have one person that just sits there and pushes a button for them all and it all works automatically.

Correct. Been like that for some time however.

Back when I was in college, so you're talking 2 decades ago, it was like that. I interned for a middle market company that owned a half dozen stations. The morning show was live, but the rest was all pre-recorded. So you would get a DJ to come in, record their "scripts" for the day, and then would take off. They would be in for an hour to record 1-2 days of sound bites for that day/next.

If you listened to the station, sometimes the computer would mess up and it would be amusing. You could always tell what stations had prerecorded because they never mention the time, day, or things that you would have to know looking at the clock. Meaning, it could not be so accurate because the software wasn't.

Unless you work in a big 50 or 100 market station, those guys made little money. Most had 2nd jobs or worked as DJ/program manager/station manager to make enough to live on.

Locations are rented and owners are often paid little, if anything. Getting use of locations for as little as possible is the job of the location manager...which is a position I've held on a few sets.

For real shows/tv/movies, the owner banks. Its generally worth it to rent out your place to TV and movie productions that are union gigs especially. if you live in a shooting market and have a cool place its worth getting your place listed with the local or state film office.

pretty conflicting views right here.. hehe

Could be either, really. If a bar or restaurant isn't open for lunch, then allowing a crew to film there during those hours would just be gravy. But what do you really need to show in order to convey that a scene is taking place in a restaurant? Wouldn't take much, especially if you are already employing caterers.

Radio stations are the worst.. Many of them don't even have $5/hr DJ's anymore but use computer controlled set ups with pre recorded voice overs. Clear Channel has destroyed the radio industry in central FL for example.

They own most of the main stations and buy out any of the smaller ones then play the same 50 bargain basement songs over and over..

That's why I listen to WMNF 88.5 Community Radio in the car, always - one of the best listener supported stations in the country, right here in Tampa Bay. An ex was a CheapChannel DJ years ago, and I was in the local radio/TV clique for a couple years by association (they were all part of the same pack). Watching how their on-air talent got used, marginalized and cast away made me sick to the whole commercial radio and TV industries. I have many foul insider stories about them.

But the question was about shooting TV scenes.. I was in Austin, TX, when my brother owned a bar on Pecan/6th Street, and Lone Star beer was shooting a commercial at and around the funky restaurant on the corner. They blocked street and sidewalk traffic off and on, tore the place up with lighting equipment and cables everywhere, for almost a WEEK. The local business owners groused constantly about "the TV people." The result was a six second shot in the commercial that was so processed you could barely recognize where it was. They must have had some budget they wanted to blow, wanted to have their expenses paid to hang out for the SXSW Festival.

This happened to us.

A Location scout goes around looking for locations to shoot a scene. If they like your location (office, bar, whatever), they pay you to rent the space. Sometimes it can be very lucrative - $10,000 a day, and, if they need to do any "set decoration", they either return your place to the original condition (paint, construction, etc), or they can leave the set decoration as-is depending on the rights and if the "look" is owned by a artist or company. A big budget Sci-fi or super hero movie would take every last spec of paint with them for sure, but a small budget mainstream production might let you keep it.

It depends on the production level. I have a friend who produces and scouts for films in the 100k to 2 mil range. He of course tries to pay as little as possible.

Warner Brothers on the other hand is another story.

I worked on Army Wives for a year or so. They were somewhere in between. That was for Lifetime if I remember correctly. Not deep pockets. hehe.

here's how it works.... the script is broken down to shots and numbered... then the heads of department have a meeting after going over the script and break it down per department...

the location manager will pick all the locations needed, while props blah blah blah takes care of their end and so forth....

so now it's 2 crews working.... the rigging crew and the shooting crew.. and the B roll sometimes...B roll is stuff dropped between scenes like a freeway shot or helicopter shot or maybe a slow city or country pan etc...

the rigging crew go first and lays in the power, the lights and some other bothersome stuff... they split and the shooting crew come in and works with actors etc while the rigging crew is setting up the next location. when the shooting crew is done the rigging crew swings back and breaks the set down and moves on to what's next on the list... crews that can shoot 7-10 pages of a scripts a day are kicking ass... figure 1 hour episodic scripts are 45 pages.... most shows shoot an episode in 7-8 days...

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