Dark Knight Rises Trailer II

The Dark Knight Rises has been in production for a very long time all over the world. When the first teaser trailer was out last summer, the movie had already been shot on two continents and was shooting in Pittsburgh.  So there were no local shots in the first trailer for obvious reasons.

It was fun to see Pittsburgh show up prominently in the new The Dark Knight Rises trailer that has just started playing (12/11). The portions of the trailer shot in Pittsburgh include:

• The long stadium shots were all from Heinz Field, and those shots open the trailer, with the kid singing the National Anthem
• The field explosion, dramatically enhanced by CGI
• The fighting in front of gray-columned Mellon Institute (though a lot more of the fighting was also shot in New York City recently)
• One street scene with a low-flowing aircraft filmed in downtown on Smithfield St. 

The second trailer is now available online.  I don't seem to be in it, though I was only about 10 rows away from the kid who was singing.

     

2011 - Busy Moviemaking Year and More to Come!

I haven't posted here much this year, due more to having a very busy volunteer project.  Did a little extra work on Steel Town (later renamed Still I Rise), and was one of about 10,000 free extras who sat in Heinz Field for a Saturday for stadium crowd scenes for The Dark Knight Rises.  It looked like Anne Hathaway and Joseph Gordon-Levitt briefly visited the set, but Tom Hardy was there long enough for a general introduction.  Sadly, I was out of my seat and looking for some water at that point, so I missed Hardy completely.

The next Tom Cruise movie, One Shot, will be filmed here this fall.  Rosamund Pike (An Education) and David Oyelowo (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) will co-star.

Last year, I complained a little that while I'm glad more movies are being shot in the Pittsburgh area, I wished a better quality of movie was filmed here.  That just might have happened.  While Warrior, shot here in 2009, has been a slow-starter at the box office, it's a very good movie, a darker version of last year's The Fighter.  Excellent performances by Joel Edgerton, Tom Hardy and Nick Nolte.  If you haven't seen Warrior, go see it even if you don't care for fight movies.

And, Abduction, shot here in the summer of 2010 with some reshoots in May 2011, has been getting lots of TV commercials and trailers.  The trailer makes it look quite compelling.