Chicago had a 20% year-on-year location filming increase in 2013, mainly due to a rise in television production. The Illinois city hosted six TV series at the same time and three studio features also filmed locally one after the other.
The Location Guide has formed a media partnership with Initialize Films, who will host the 5th European Film Finance Update at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. On 8 and 9 February 2014 a panel of industry experts will discuss film finance in a dozen European territories.
Developers in Manchester in northern England are preparing to launch a new filming facility aimed at drama productions. The Space Project is scheduled to open in May 2014 and will offer five purpose-built studio spaces, as well as workshop, dressing and make-up facilities.
Screen Yorkshire in northern England has secured an extra GBP7.5 million in funding from the European Regional Development Fund. The money will help fund productions filming on location in the area, which recently have included the Birmingham-set period gangster series Peaky Blinders.
London-based visual effects company Cinesite VFX has announced it will open a new office in Montreal, Quebec. The company – whose credits include Tom Cruise’s upcoming sci-fi Edge of Tomorrow – will be spending CAD6.7 million with the help of an interest-free provincial government loan.
An online portfolio is showcasing filming locations in Ireland managed by the Coillte estate. Coillte is a state-sponsored organisation that manages around 450,000 hectares of mostly forest and woodland across the country. The showcase could help attract more productions on the scale of Vikings.
A new report from FilmLA has revealed the scale of the filming decline in Los Angeles in recent years. Production increased through the course of 2013 but filming was still dramatically below the city’s historic peaks, with feature film location work declining by 50% since 1996.
Internet TV network Netflix will build on the success of House of Cards with a miniseries based on the life of 13th Century traveller and writer Marco Polo. The Weinstein Company will produce the production that will film at Pinewood Studios’ Malaysia facility.