Birmingham filming for Spielberg’s Ready Player One
Steven Spielberg returned to the UK to film his sci-fi movie Ready Player One, using London as a production base but also shooting in Birmingham in the West Midlands.
By Nick Goundry 29 Mar 2018
Steven Spielberg returned to the UK to film his sci-fi movie Ready Player One, using London as a production base but also shooting in Birmingham in the West Midlands.
Based on a novel by Ernest Cline, the film follows young hero Wade Watts in a future America where people spend much of their time in a wish-fulfilment virtual-reality environment known as the Oasis.
Spielberg based the shoot at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden north-west of London, but also shot scenes further north in Birmingham, focussing on the city’s Digbeth and Jewellery Quarter regions.
The locations were selected as they were relatively unfamiliar to cinema audiences and so made enticing stand-ins for Ready Player One’s specific vision of a mid-21st century Ohio.
“It’s difficult to make location changes on the scale we needed on the streets of London,” says Ali James, the film’s supervising location manager, in comments to KFTV. “We were looking for dystopian visuals and Birmingham offered this massive, relatively untapped industrial feel.”
Another key advantage was that Birmingham was only an hour away from London and had all the infrastructural support necessary for a production on the scale of Ready Player One.
“We found a long street on a gradient that was a good double for the kind of lengthy high streets you find in the US, and we also filmed underneath the city’s ‘spaghetti junction’ interchange,” says James. “We got key support from agencies like Film Birmingham and Highways England.”
Overall, the production team spent a couple of months finalising permissions and prepping for a location shoot of around ten days.
Action set in Ready Player One’s Oasis setting was filmed digitally using performance capture technology in a studio space known as a ‘volume’. The Oasis environment and character avatars were created by visual effects companies Industrial Light & Magic and Digital Domain.
Scenes set in the ‘real’ world outside the Oasis were shot on film. Villainous organisation Innovative Online Industries (IOI) had its main locations built as sets on Leavesden’s sound stages.
A story setting known as the Stacks, home to Watts at the start of the story and comprising what was essentially a chaotic mishmash of mobile homes and caravans, was one of the film’s key settings that was built as a partial set on Leavesden’s back lot.
Spielberg frequently bases his films in London and the south of England. The filmmaker is next scheduled to shoot in the UK from the spring of 2019 for the latest in the enduringly popular Indiana Jones franchise.
Images: Warner Bros
Spielberg based the shoot at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden north-west of London, but also shot scenes further north in Birmingham, focussing on the city’s Digbeth and Jewellery Quarter regions.
The locations were selected as they were relatively unfamiliar to cinema audiences and so made enticing stand-ins for Ready Player One’s specific vision of a mid-21st century Ohio.
“It’s difficult to make location changes on the scale we needed on the streets of London,” says Ali James, the film’s supervising location manager, in comments to KFTV. “We were looking for dystopian visuals and Birmingham offered this massive, relatively untapped industrial feel.”
Another key advantage was that Birmingham was only an hour away from London and had all the infrastructural support necessary for a production on the scale of Ready Player One.
“We found a long street on a gradient that was a good double for the kind of lengthy high streets you find in the US, and we also filmed underneath the city’s ‘spaghetti junction’ interchange,” says James. “We got key support from agencies like Film Birmingham and Highways England.”
Overall, the production team spent a couple of months finalising permissions and prepping for a location shoot of around ten days.
Action set in Ready Player One’s Oasis setting was filmed digitally using performance capture technology in a studio space known as a ‘volume’. The Oasis environment and character avatars were created by visual effects companies Industrial Light & Magic and Digital Domain.
Scenes set in the ‘real’ world outside the Oasis were shot on film. Villainous organisation Innovative Online Industries (IOI) had its main locations built as sets on Leavesden’s sound stages.
A story setting known as the Stacks, home to Watts at the start of the story and comprising what was essentially a chaotic mishmash of mobile homes and caravans, was one of the film’s key settings that was built as a partial set on Leavesden’s back lot.
Spielberg frequently bases his films in London and the south of England. The filmmaker is next scheduled to shoot in the UK from the spring of 2019 for the latest in the enduringly popular Indiana Jones franchise.
Images: Warner Bros
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