[Vantage Point Poster via Flickr]

A few weeks ago I watched Vantage Point, an engrossing movie about the US President and the Secret Service that takes place in Salamanca (Spain).

There was something too perfect about the way Salamanca was being shown on screen… so I looked up the shooting location and foudn out that the film was actually shot in Mexico with a reproduction of the main Plaza Mayor (Square) of Salamanca:

To build this plaza, the production discovered an ideal place in the southern part of Mexico City. Executive Producer Callum Greene explains, “We found an abandoned four-story mall which became a perfect area for us. We built our construction, carpentry, metal work, and plastic shops in the abandoned mall. Next to it was a pit where we built our Plaza Mayor.”

There is something about the scale of efforts of money that goes into movie productions that got me thinking about the boundary that still separates the movie business from TV, videogames or online. To get a sense of scale of this production, imagine building Times Square on a set to show a realistic backdrop to a movie.

So how long must we wait until a film studio automatically goes for computer generated effects to create such an illusion and not old-school carpentry? I don’t follow the film industry that much but thought we were very close to being able to realistically reproduce any environment in detail… take for example Grand Theft Auto.

Who knows, maybe we still have a couple more years of “pit building” for movies. In the meantime, enjoy the show, and the carpentry.