8 Years Later They Filmed The Road Where I Took My First Photos Ever.

The Road was filmed in Erie, PA back in 2008.

For the most part it looked like they just used the Peninsula, but in the last half hour of the movie I noticed a clip of the father and son walking down a boat ramp.  I live less than 5 minutes from that boat ramp! It's located in my hometown, Lawrence Park.

I was soooo happy to see that location being used in a major motion picture production, because I've always felt that place had strong aesthetic potential.  

This piece of work below I had taken at that location was back in the year 2000.  My first year in photography.


Note:  (This boat loading concrete slab below was out of the video frame above, it was 30 yards to the right.)

However, I came back to this location the winter of 2010 and found a shopping cart already there.  The shopping cart was a major icon in the movie.  The father and son traveled with their belongings in it, through particular shots of the movie!

1.  

I know for a fact that it had not clearly hit me while shooting (in 2010), that this was in fact a found still life representing one of the great characteristics of the movie exactly where it had been filmed two years prior! 

It was extremely coincidental for both placement and found object  to have occurred at all.


I mean...  I wouldn't be looking for a shopping cart at the bottom of the lake cliff boat loading dock, ya know?


Had I realized this at the time I would have shot it like the scene captured in the film above.
But it didn't entirely matter, because at that point in the movie they were using some sort of makeshift cart to carry what they had around.  So it would have been a continuity issue on my end regardless.


Here's my shots from 2010 from the exact same boat loading location from the film though:

And below I've supplied an article which talks about the director's experience with filming in Pittsburgh and Erie.  It's pretty good.  It states that they actually had really good weather while filming here and had to do quite a bit of unexpected editing to make it look worse. 

Haha, but if you live here 9 days out of 10 it looks like it does in The Road.  Go figure.


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/movies/27road.html