Pros and Cons
Location shooting has several advantages over filming on a studio set:
- It can be cheaper than constructing large sets
- The illusion of reality can be stronger - it is hard to replicate real-world wear-and-tear, and architectural details
- It sometimes allows the use of cheaper non-union labor or to bypass a work stoppage in the US. Canadian locations such as Vancouver and Toronto are known for this.
- It sometimes allows "frozen" currency to be used. The 1968 movie Kelly's Heroes was filmed in Yugoslavia using profits that had been made on movie exhibitions in that country but could not be exported.
Its disadvantages include:
- A lack of control over the environment — lighting, passing aircraft, traffic, pedestrians, bad weather, city regulations, etc.
- Finding a real-world location which exactly matches the requirements of the script
- Members of the audience may be familiar with a real-world location used to double as a fictional location (such as Rumble in the Bronx inexplicably showing the mountains outside Vancouver in the background of an urban Bronx-set scene)
- Taking a whole film crew to film on location can be extremely expensive
Location shooting can provide significant economic development benefit to an area because local cast and crew use facilities such as catering and accommodation.
Read more about this topic: Location Shooting
Famous quotes related to pros and cons:
“Quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood. The commonest way in which we deceive either ourselves or others about understanding is by assuming something as familiar, and accepting it on that account; with all its pros and cons, such knowing never gets anywhere, and it knows not why.... The analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, was, in fact, nothing else than ridding it of the form in which it had become familiar.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)