Friday, April 11, 2008 – Filming CSI

As the movie industry knows, Los Angeles can be many places. The airport at the end of Casablanca – Rick sends Ilsa and Victor off to Lisbon on that foggy night – is the Van Nuys airport, soon to be an office park.  That fishing hole in the opening credits of the old Andy Griffin Show is the reservoir at Franklin Canyon Park just off Coldwater Canyon, where the series Combat was also shot, along with a few episodes of Star Trek. You want a New England town?  You film in Claremont, the college town on the east end of the county.  And Atlanta burned in Gone with the Wind – in Culver City. The list is endless.

And with your cast, crew, directors, management, craft services and production facilities here, you don't film in Miami. Why haul everything off to South Florida?  Naples Island, Alamitos Bay, Long Beach, will do – close enough.  It looks the part.  So here you have CSI: Miami – produced in partnership with the Canadian media company Alliance Atlantis and CBS Paramount Television – filming on Naples Island.

The beach and marina shots are usually filmed in Marina del Rey, the exterior of their police headquarters is the FAA Credit Union near LAX, and the police lab interiors are filmed at a studio complex in Manhattan Beach. But if you need a bridge over a canal and rows of expensive boats, you film on Naples Island, Alamitos Bay, down in Long Beach.

The scene being filmed here on Thursday, April 10 – the cops stop a young kid with a bag of something on a bridge.

And "Miami" in the background –

Wet streets look always look better on camera than dry streets – more contrast – so you bring a water truck.

Onlookers –

If you wish to use any of these photos for commercial purposes I assume you'll discuss that with me. And should you choose to download any of these images and use them invoking the "fair use" provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976, please provide credit, and, on the web, a link back this site.

Technical Note:

Photographs after March 3, 2008, were taken with a Nikon D200 – or a Nikon D70 when noted. All previous photographs were taken with the D70. The lenses used are (1) AF-S Nikkor 18-70 mm 1:35-4.5G ED, or (2) AF Nikkor 70-300 mm telephoto, or (3) AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 55-200 mm f/4-5.6G ED. Photography here is modified for web posting using Adobe Photoshop 7.0.  The earliest photography in the archives was done with a Sony Mavica digital still camera (MVC-FD-88) with built-in digital zoom.

All text and photos, unless otherwise noted, Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 - Alan M. Pavlik