Captain Phillips, Tom Hanks’ new feature, will be filming on location in Virginia. Virginia Beach is the home base for the guided missile destroyer Bainbridge, which was part of the operation to rescue Phillips when he was taken hostage by Somali pirates in 2009.
Film London has been given funding to launch EuroScreen, a two-year initiative designed to drive the growth of film tourism across Europe. The development comes in the aftermath of a 2011 report from Sweden that considered the film tourism impact of the Millennium films.
A feature adaptation of a notorious real-life encounter with Somali pirates is filming on location in Malta, with the Mediterranean doubling for the Indian Ocean. Tom Hanks is playing the lead and Paul Greengrass is directing.
Virtual stage specialist Stargate Studios is opening a branch at Studio Babelsberg near Berlin. With more productions chasing filming incentives to shoot in Germany, Stargate will offer an on-site resource to projects looking to create environments not available locally.
It’s been a busy week for ads and we’ve covered spots filmed in Iceland, Buenos Aires and California. A popular TV story has been news that the BBC will be filming a new period drama in Dublin, doubling the city for the East End of London in the late 19th Century. In the real London there’s the popular filming estate that’s less enthusiastic about its screen image.
“We want to bring an existing 70-foot racing yacht from Spain to Malta and shoot it in the water tank.” This was the first phone call from the UK. But this proved too costly, which prompted the producers to opt for a more creative solution;
This week we’ve covered eye-catching new commercials from Garmin, VW China and a Brazilian language school, with filming locations found in Austria, Beijing and California respectively. New figures from Britain revealed that the UK had a good 2011, while Columbia Pictures is scouting Malta and North Africa for its new Tom Hanks project Captain Phillips.
A new feature telling the true story of a US sea captain’s 2009 encounter with Somali pirates is scouting filming locations in Malta and Morocco. Captain Phillips will star Tom Hanks as the captain who offered himself as a prisoner to the pirates in exchange for the release of his crew.