Western trivia: James Stewart, who was almost as famous in the Wild West genre as John Wayne, wore the same hat & rode the same horse in almost all of his westerns. Kubrick trivia: While almost all of the sets from "The Shining" are obviously long gone, it's still possible to visit some of the iconic rooms of the Overlook Hotel - due to having filled every sound stage at Elstree Studios, the kitchen & cold storage room scenes were filmed in the re-dressed building 5, which normally held various production offices & still exists today & can be visited if you're ever at Elstree. Pirates trivia: The main theme actually has a name - it's called "He's a pirate". More music trivia: What we're hearing as The Hammer introduces us to the FF experience is the theme from the TV series "Airwolf" 😁 Production trivia: Giant LED screens like the ones we see on this tour have become part of the modern CGI film production process - fully or partially surrounding a sound stage with such a screen makes it possible to display CG imagery for in-camera shooting, as opposed to using a green or blue screen & adding it later. The setup is called a "Volume" & can even display real-time rendered graphics, keyed to change perspective, lighting etc. in sync with camera & live studio lighting. This is accomplished using the Unreal Engine, a computer program originally designed to create realistic 3D graphics for games. The first major use of a Volume set was for the Star Wars series "Mandalorian". Vin Diesel trivia: While his image as an actor is "macho & muscles", Vin Diesel flaunts stereotypes & is proudly an enormous nerd with a particular penchant for Dungeons & Dragons, an interest he loves to share with fans & other nerds. King Kong trivia: The ship from the original film, "Venture", makes a very obscure cameo in the widely panned all-CGI film "Sky Captain & The World Of Tomorrow" - during a scene where the heroes travel underwater (in a converted Curtiss P-40 Warhawk propeller airplane... it's a weird movie) the "Venture" can be spotted as a wreck on the ocean floor. There's even a giant cage on the deck, presumably the one used to transport Kong. More King Kong trivia: The huge dinosaur Kong fights & kills was ostensibly a T-Rex in the original film, but for the Peter Jackson version it was called the Vastatosaurus Rex or V-Rex, supposedly a species which had evolved further on Skull Island in the millions of years since the age of dinosaurs - it isn't mentioned in the film itself, but the production made an entire "nature documentary" about the island, which can still be found on TH-cam, featuring many of the artists from the film like John Howe & Richard Taylor, as well as Jackson himself, naming many of the animals & revealing that shortly after the events of the film, the island sank into the ocean.
Re Elstree Studios: Everything about sound stages is fascinating, I could make an entire concept just about that! Re Airwolf: The logic behind choosing this theme as background is a bit far out. The theme is from the time of Magnum and Miami Vice, so it gives me a kind of "fast car association", and Fast & Furious is almost just as much about fast driving as flying through the air, so in some abstract way my choice ended on Airwolf! There used to be a scale model of the King Kong ship Venture on Universal's backlot (you see a picture of it at 7:34 in the video). Maybe the cameo in Sky Captain was the scale model.
Western trivia: James Stewart, who was almost as famous in the Wild West genre as John Wayne, wore the same hat & rode the same horse in almost all of his westerns.
Kubrick trivia: While almost all of the sets from "The Shining" are obviously long gone, it's still possible to visit some of the iconic rooms of the Overlook Hotel - due to having filled every sound stage at Elstree Studios, the kitchen & cold storage room scenes were filmed in the re-dressed building 5, which normally held various production offices & still exists today & can be visited if you're ever at Elstree.
Pirates trivia: The main theme actually has a name - it's called "He's a pirate".
More music trivia: What we're hearing as The Hammer introduces us to the FF experience is the theme from the TV series "Airwolf" 😁
Production trivia: Giant LED screens like the ones we see on this tour have become part of the modern CGI film production process - fully or partially surrounding a sound stage with such a screen makes it possible to display CG imagery for in-camera shooting, as opposed to using a green or blue screen & adding it later. The setup is called a "Volume" & can even display real-time rendered graphics, keyed to change perspective, lighting etc. in sync with camera & live studio lighting. This is accomplished using the Unreal Engine, a computer program originally designed to create realistic 3D graphics for games. The first major use of a Volume set was for the Star Wars series "Mandalorian".
Vin Diesel trivia: While his image as an actor is "macho & muscles", Vin Diesel flaunts stereotypes & is proudly an enormous nerd with a particular penchant for Dungeons & Dragons, an interest he loves to share with fans & other nerds.
King Kong trivia: The ship from the original film, "Venture", makes a very obscure cameo in the widely panned all-CGI film "Sky Captain & The World Of Tomorrow" - during a scene where the heroes travel underwater (in a converted Curtiss P-40 Warhawk propeller airplane... it's a weird movie) the "Venture" can be spotted as a wreck on the ocean floor. There's even a giant cage on the deck, presumably the one used to transport Kong.
More King Kong trivia: The huge dinosaur Kong fights & kills was ostensibly a T-Rex in the original film, but for the Peter Jackson version it was called the Vastatosaurus Rex or V-Rex, supposedly a species which had evolved further on Skull Island in the millions of years since the age of dinosaurs - it isn't mentioned in the film itself, but the production made an entire "nature documentary" about the island, which can still be found on TH-cam, featuring many of the artists from the film like John Howe & Richard Taylor, as well as Jackson himself, naming many of the animals & revealing that shortly after the events of the film, the island sank into the ocean.
Re Elstree Studios: Everything about sound stages is fascinating, I could make an entire concept just about that!
Re Airwolf: The logic behind choosing this theme as background is a bit far out. The theme is from the time of Magnum and Miami Vice, so it gives me a kind of "fast car association", and Fast & Furious is almost just as much about fast driving as flying through the air, so in some abstract way my choice ended on Airwolf!
There used to be a scale model of the King Kong ship Venture on Universal's backlot (you see a picture of it at 7:34 in the video). Maybe the cameo in Sky Captain was the scale model.