TV

London airport gets in on the TV shoots, with a fake snowstorm thrown in

A new TV shoot has touched down at the London International Airport, the latest in a growing number of TV and movie productions choosing the Forest City as their filming destination.

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A new TV shoot has touched down at the London International Airport, the latest in a growing number of TV and movie productions choosing the Forest City as their filming destination.

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Only months after a portion of London’s downtown was turned into New York City for an Apple TV series called Improbable Valentine, a film crew was at the airport Tuesday, using the east London facility for an Amazon-backed TV series called The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh.

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The comedy stars Naveen Andrews, best known for his role as Sayid Jarrah in the television series Lost, and will tell the story of an Indian family and their experiences as new immigrants in the United States, according to Variety.

Produced by Sony Pictures Television and Amazon Studios, the show will stream on Amazon Freevee, an ad-supported streaming platform that’s replacing Amazon’s IMDb Freedive, Variety said.

Filming at the airport began Monday and was expected to wrap up Tuesday, unless scenes need to be reshot, a member of the crew said.

Part of the production involved turning the London airport into Pittsburgh International Airport and recreating a snow storm.

It wasn’t immediately known when the eight-episode series will debut.

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It’s the fourth time in the past year the airport has been used as a filming location, said Scott McFadzean, the airport’s chief executive, adding the production had no impact on the operation of the facility.

“We’re just easy and comfortable to work with and a friendly, lower-cost option,” he said.

“So it’s an opportunity we see to utilize the airport more.”

More broadly speaking, several factors are contributing to London and Southwestern Ontario’s increasing popularity among film and TV crews, said Andrew Dodd, manager of Film London, a city hall agency created in 2021 to attract productions to the city.

The region is getting some spillover from Toronto that has become a major destination for the TV and movie industries.

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“As productions increase in Ontario, and we know that they are, Toronto is getting a lot of productions, so it can be difficult to find some resources in the Toronto-Hamilton areas, so (these companies) are starting to look elsewhere,” Dodd said.

Also playing in the region’s favour is its diversity of landscapes that can easily accommodate rural and big-city settings. In 2020, for instance, a portion of Apple TV’s series See that stars Aquaman actor Jason Momoa was filmed at the former psychiatric hospital near St. Thomas.

“When you’re in these lakeshore towns, they can double as small communities or towns adjacent to much larger bodies of water if you want something set on the ocean, for example,” Dodd said.

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“You’ve got beautiful country escapes and then, you know, with cities like Windsor and especially with London, you can have that larger city look as well.”

But more important was London’s decision to make a concerted effort to tap into the film and TV industry that has exploded in recent years as big studies and companies have invested heavily in creating content for their streaming platforms, Dodd said, adding London has also been used to film smaller budget films and shows recently.

“I think London is very unique in the sense that administration and some very passionate individuals had the foresight to understand the value of this business, and to invest time and effort and resources into saying, ‘Yes, let’s create this film office; let’s be ambitious about it,’ ” he said.

“I think that’s a really unique series of events and, I can say it’s got London on a lot of people’s radars.”

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Twitter.com/JuhaatLFPress

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