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CHAPTER TEN

Inside or outside?

In the very early years of the cinema, almost all filming was done outside. Today, filming is done ‘on location’ when it is impossible to build a real city, or a mountain or something, inside the studio. Also, some directors prefer to film on location. It is then that the cameras go out into the real world.

All of some films are shot on location, but others have only short outside scenes to join with the scenes that are shot in the studio.

As an example, suppose it is important to show a policeman arriving at an office on Fifth Avenue, in New York, and meeting a businesswoman inside the building. A location film crew will ‘shoot’ the policeman getting out of a taxi on Fifth Avenue and walking into the office building. But the scene where he meets the businesswoman in the office will be filmed inside a studio, perhaps days or weeks later.

All studios have large ‘stages’ where the sets are built. One of the biggest in the world is at the British studios of Pinewood in Buckinghamshire, where one of the stages is 102 metres long.

Sets are sometimes used for more than one film, and this was very true for cowboy films that were made in the 1920s and 1930s. Then, a Hollywood studio often made thirty or forty of them in a year, and the street where the cowboys had their final gunfight often appeared in film after film, with only small changes.

Film facts

The largest number of locations used in a Hollywood film was 140, for Around the World in 80 Days (1956).

The largest number of cameras used for a single scene was forty-eight for the sea battle in the 1925 film of Ben Hur.