Sanford and I scouted some possible locations for establishing 2040s Toronto. Based on conversations with people and previous exploring, we’ve hit upon the idea of using alleys that have front doors leading onto them — there’s something inherently strange and inverted about them to begin with, and the narrower scale and ramshackle construction gives the feel of a third world country.
On revisiting them I realized a lucky thing — that the laneways with front doors were also public laneways with street names, as opposed to the majority of the private laneways. The private laneways require releases from the owners to clear E&O, while the public laneways do not.
The permits are free but you need to be a production company insured for $2M to get them. I talked with Patti at the city today and she said that while hypothetically you can be fined for shooting without a permit, it’s more an issue with liability — if someone trips over a cable, you can be sued. The day we visited was really quiet, however, no cars or people in sight.
I’ve been thinking about Alley Ways vs. regular streets. What I’m thinking is, regular streets, now that there’s very few cars, have been populated with shanties. They would run in rows down the centre of the street. i.e. you have houses on each side of the street, with a row of shanties down the middle. Where as alley ways are too thin to host shanties, so they in turn become more desirably to live in, as it’s just houses across from each other, and there’s no shanties in view.
That said, I think a Toronto of 2040 being less populated rather than more populated would be easier to film (and perhaps more realistic.. we don’t all of sudden become so uneducated and start having a population explosion). Perhaps an analogy is J.F. Sebastian’s apartment in Blade Runner. He lives in an empty building in an under populated section of town. What happens when people leave a city? (think downtown Detroit). Housing prices plummet and areas become derelict.