thumb|Mike Chin filming a low-budget movie on location in Portsmouth Square in [[Chinatown, San Francisco|San Francisco's Chinatown in 1983]]
Location shooting is the shooting of a film or television production in a real-world setting rather than a sound stage or backlot. The location may be indoors or outdoors.
When filmmaking professionals refer to shooting "on location", they are usually referring to a "practical location", which is any location that already exists in the real world.
The filming location may be the same in which the story is set (for example, scenes in the film The Interpreter were set and shot inside the United Nations Headquarters in Manhattan), or it may stand in for a different locale (the films Amadeus and The Illusionist were primarily set in Vienna, but were filmed in Prague). Location shooting includes any practical location which resembles the location of a scene in the script; for example, students in the film school of the University of Southern California traditionally use a specific location in the basement of Doheny Library as a stand in for the corridors of Grand Central Terminal which lead to the rail platforms. it will always look better than a set. The film was widely criticized for its cheap look because it was obviously filmed on an architecturally ambiguous set against the chaparral-covered hills of Burbank. Shooting on a set gives the crew greater control over the environment: a room may be created to the exacting specifications of the story, for example, and there is no need to shut down street traffic when shooting on a backlot. For certain iconic locations like the Main Concourse of Grand Central Terminal, shooting cast members in a corner simply will not suffice. The crew will need to secure control over the entire space to control what enters the shot, and securing such a location can be a considerable challenge. As a result, lighting equipment is usually placed on the floor where it will get in the way and radiate heat energy into cast and crew at close range.
Location shooting by definition occurs outside the studio, but sometimes it can occur near the studio. This raises the problem of which locations are so close that they should be considered within reasonable commuting distance and the cast and crew must bear the cost of commuting there, and which locations are so unreasonably distant that the studio should bear the cost of putting up cast and crew in hotels. For Hollywood films, the boundary between the two is expressly delineated in union agreements and is known as the studio zone. Many location shoots, however, are far from the home studio, sometimes on the other side of the world. In these instances, location shooting can provide significant economic development benefits to the area in which they are shot. Cast and crew heavily rely upon local facilities such as catering, transportation, and accommodations. Local personnel are frequently hired to fill minor cast and crew roles, thereby relieving the studio of the expense of transporting all those people from its home country and obtaining appropriate work visas. A film that becomes a blockbuster hit can introduce movie audiences around the world to a visually breathtaking location that they were previously unaware of, as the Lord of the Rings trilogy did for New Zealand. This can boost tourism for years or even decades.
Practicalities
thumb|New York City's [[Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting prohibits parking near shooting locations.]]
Location shooting usually requires a location manager, and locations are usually chosen by a location scout. Many popular locations, such as New York City in the United States, Toronto in Canada, and the Isle of Man, a crown dependency of the United Kingdom, have dedicated film offices to encourage location shooting, and to suggest appropriate locations to film-makers.
In many cases a second unit is dispatched to film on location, with a second unit director and sometimes with stand-in actors. These shots can then be edited into the final film or TV program alongside studio-shot sequences, to give an authentic flavor, without the expense or trouble of a full-scale location shoot. NYPD Blue, for example, was filmed primarily in Los Angeles, but used second unit footage of New York City for color, as well as featuring a small number of episodes filmed on location with the cast.
See also
- Location library
- Set (film and TV scenery)
- Filmmaking