Exploring An Abandoned Movie Set.

This trip to the abandoned movie set was pretty spectacular. I had seen this place in another photographers work and had been itching to go ever since. After I spent some time looking in the complete wrong place following false leads my friend Brandon over at The need for exploration got the pin and off we went. Going into this place was quite the journey we assumed we were not allowed to be there so we took a route that led through the back, this proved later to be a mistake as this place was wide open all the fences torn down and many local people had obviously been through the area. Never the less we took the hard route, starting at a fenced in train track, we climbed over the fence (very ungracefully as I am not a good fence climber) and through a convenient hole in the fence on the other side, after we made it though the fences we were met with an actual ocean of picker and thorn bushes with no way around them. So we went right though them, honestly if you walk fast they don’t bother you so much especially with the winter clothes on. Once we made it out of the thorn ocean we came across these two really cool looking air traffic control towers, as the movie set was just on the side of a mostly abandoned air field. We climbed up to the top of both of them and caught a great view, you could see the movie set way in the distance and the long walk we still had to walk to get there. The towers themselves were pretty destroyed internally, lots of the walls ripped down, graffiti head to toe, and holes in some of the stair cases but that didn’t stop my bad ass friend Amber from hanging off the ladder on the side of the tower( Really wish I got a picture of that). After we got our shots at the towers we began the long walk across the air strip to the movie set, we were walking for a bit we came across a small stream just big enough to not be able to jump over, we hiked a good ways up stream hoping it would end but when it didn’t I decided it was thin enough and shallow enough at that point to jump across…I was wrong. The stream as it turns out was much deeper than anticipated and though I almost made the jump I didn’t get all the way over, and landed knee deep in freezing cold muddy water, In my shoes, in my pants, it was the best failure. After watching me fail at jumping over, my friends made the intelligent decision to back track to a small tree branch and cross that way which was definitely the correct decision as they made it to the other side dry. We hiked across the rest of the air strip and finally made it to the movie set, it was absolutely worth the cold muddy feet. One of my favorite things about exploring abandoned places is that you get to see things most people never get to, like the inside of an air traffic control tower or a real Hollywood movie set and we got both in one day!
It is pretty amazing to walk around in the past, its the closest thing to time traveling I can imagine. As I said before we assumed the set would be fenced off but it was all open to walk in, unfortunately the ease of access also meant vandalism and a lot of it, nearly everything from the side walks to the roofs had some sort of shitty graffiti on it( and I will give credit where is due if its good graffiti art but this was teenage trash work). Despite the graffiti everywhere it was still so cool to be hanging out in a real movie set, I could picture all the trailers and high tech movie equipment that they must of had there while shooting. They put so much detail into just the front of these facades everything from pretend electric boxes and poles to little garages and full side walks. I think it is easy to forget with these big movies we see all the time in theaters how much work actually goes into producing some of your favorite films. One of these days I would like to take a film class and produce a good B horror movie so seeing how the pros set it up was really amazing. In the spring time I would like to grab a small group of friends and some paint buckets to “anti-vandalize” it and paint over all the garbage graffiti so we could shoot without spending hours in Photoshop erasing racial slurs and poorly painted dick’s. When we left we took the straight flat easy path that led form the set to the town houses such near by, it was safe to say after all that I was happy to be walking back on sidewalks. (side note those jeans have been washed 10 times and I still can’t get the mud stains out.)

Check out all the cool shots I got in my more galleries page and go follow my friends youtube channel The need for exploration for videos of out adventures coming soon.