A. This
was extremely difficult, and I initially thought I would probably never
find out where they filmed the scene.
At first, I assumed
that this scene was almost certainly shot somewhere in Florida.
(assuming that this dark scene wasn't completely faked on a soundstage,
with stock footage of gators).
Although most of this series is filmed in Southern California, they
spent the first few days of filming in Florida, in January, mostly
around Miami. So they had the opportunity to film this Alligator Alley
scene in its natural environment.
And if you are going to shoot an Everglades scene (with alligators) for
the very first episode, and you are already in Florida, it didn't seem
to make much sense to wait until you go back to California.
As to where in Florida they filmed it, I had no idea.
The Everglades are enormous, they cover over two million acres of
wetlands — 7,800 square miles. And I’ve never even been to Florida
.
Trying to decipher exactly where in that massive area they might have
filmed the scene, based on just 58 seconds of dark footage, is basically
impossible.
I had been tipped that they filmed something at Disney's Golden Oak Ranch, but I didn't know what. I'm familiar with the ranch, and I know that it does have
a body of water (called Pine Lake), where they could have conceivably
shot the scene, but they also have modern suburban sets, so they could
just as easily shot many other scenes there. And in its natural state,
the ranch looks more like a Midwestern prairie or a Sierra woods than it
does a Florida swamp.
But just around
the time I had given up on any way of establishing where they filmed
the scene, one of the cast members, Alex Shimizu (who plays the young
Masuka), posted a short Tik Tok video of himself playfully jumping into the waters of “Alligator Alley”, at the end of the filming there.
Obviously, that ruled
out the possibility that they actually filmed in an alligator-infested
part of Florida, since nobody's crazy enough to actually jump into that
sort of death trap for fun. And the water only came up to his
knees. That increased the possibility that they filmed at a local
SoCal location.
But as I began
examining Alex's video in detail, I spotted two Intriguing things: the
first thing was the trunk of a mangrove tree which suspiciously ended
about halfway up. It had no top, meaning that it was most likely just a
prop tree that had been added for effect.
The presence of those
distinctive mangrove trees in the scene were one of the things that had
initially convinced me that they actually shot in Florida, since they
are native to Florida, but you aren’t going to find mangrove trees
anywhere in Southern California.
But if they faked the tree, then that also increased the likelihood that they filmed the scene here in the L.A. area.
But it was the second item I spotted in that Tik Tok video that sealed the deal.
On the left side of
the video, against the sky, I spotted a faint outline that looked
familiar. So I used Photoshop to enhance it, and found what I recognized
was one of the large power transmission towers that support the
electrical power lines across some of the mountains and the open spaces
of Southern California.
Better yet, I found
this StreetView of the main gate to Golden Oak Ranch, where, in the
background, you can clearly see those identical transmission towers straddling
the top of the nearby hills.
And that convinced me.
But as this photo of the ranch's Pine Lake shows, the pointed green reeds
seen in Alex's video are also very common there:
Hollywood has always
been in the business of faking locations, of making Southern California
look like other parts of the world. And this was just another example of
just that kind of Hollywood magic.
They did an effective
job of disguising a small part of the ranch’s Pine Lake to look like
the Everglades. They did this by adding the fake mangrove trunk to the
shallow lake, adding a few tropical plants, a fake alligator in the
water, and hanging Florida’s trademark Spanish moss from some of the
trees. (Plus of course, a few seconds of stock footage of
alligators in a feeding frenzy...)
Add to that the
fact that all of the scenes were night scenes, with darkness and some
atmospheric fog concealing many of the details in the scene, plus
selective camera angles, and it wasn’t that hard to pass off a local
body of water, such as Pine Lake, for a small bit of Florida swamp.
Why not shoot in
Florida? They only had a few days to film there, and a lot of other
scenes to shoot (plus a ton of establishing shots), while here in
California they could take their time. And since it was too dangerous to
work in a real swamp with real gators anyway, they were probably going
to have to fake it even if they filmed in Florida. So why not take
your time and shoot it at home? That way, they didn't have to get around
to the shoot until late August.
But Alex's Tik Tok
video (and his crazy stunt), which was shot broad daylight, pulled back
that curtain, and revealed details that weren't visible in the original
scenes.
Here is a StreetView of the ranch entrance, showing those
same electrical towers on top of the hill:
Here is an aerial photo of the location. And here is a map link.
