Dexter: Original Sin Filming Locations: Dexter's college
The
location: Dexter's college
Q.
What is it supposed to be on the show?
A. A university campus.
Q.
Where is it supposed to be on the show?
A. In Miami, Florida.
Q.
When did we see it on the show?
A. We first see Dexter's college in Episode
1, of Season 1, when Dexter goes for a stroll on campus, where a jobs fair is underway, walking past booths
put up my businesses attempting to recruit new graduates.
It is here,
at a booth run by the Miami Metro Police Force, that Dexter first
encounters a young Vince Masuka, who, typically, seems more interested in
picking up girls than in recruiting new employees.
Dexter
introduces himself as the son of police Sargent Harry Morgan, and,
after looking at posted photos of bloody crime scenes, asks Masuka If
two of them were the same killer.
Masuka says
no, and then shoos off Dexter, because he thinks Dex is interfering with
his own ability to score with the passing co-eds.
Q.
What is it actually in real life?
A. A public park.
Q.
Where can I find it in real life?
A. In the scene, the campus is identified by a sign reading “University of Miami”.
Incent
And since there actually is a real life University of Miami, and they did film in Miami for a few days this time around, one would assume that
they filmed the scene there, especially since the scene opens with some
aerial establishing shots of the actual UofM campus.
But they didn't.
Instead, they shot it at Florida's Haulover Park, located at 10800 Collins Ave, in the Bal Harbour area of Miami Beach.
Q. How the heck did you figure out where it was?
A. Since I
live in Southern California, and I’ve never visited Miami, suffice it to
say that tracking down locations in that city can be tricky.
Given the aerial shots of the actual University of Miami, my first
assumption was that they probably shot the scene on that college campus,
and if they didn’t, I thought they probably filmed it at a college in
the San Fernando Valley, which is close to their new studio.
But when I couldn’t find photos of either location matching up with what
we saw in that scene, I took a closer look at the footage, and quickly
spotted something In the background that definitely wasn’t In the Valley: twin towers that looked like a resort hotel.
Note the hotel towers in the background:
And fortunately, Google has blessed
me with a new tool that I didn’t have when I was tracking down locations
in the original Dexter, which is the ability to show them an
image and they will turn up similar images that come close to matching
what you are looking for. ( It only succeeds some of the time, but when it does, it's great. )
So I captured a screenshot of those two towers from the episode, and
then had Google run a scan on the image.
It quickly turned up a matching
image of “The Ritz-Carlton Bal Harbour” hotel:
I then used Google Earth to determine where a camera would be
to see the hotel towers from that particular angle, and it quickly became
obvious that the scene was filmed from just across the Haulover Inlet, about
700 feet north of, and looking back south at those hotel towers.
