Where was SG1 filmed?

[GateFanSamJack]

Vancouver really has to get a handle on that situation or the studios need to buy the sites (only site left?). It's a rare treat for a city to have maintaining parks to be so closely related to maintaining their industry (filming) and whoever let those parks go (at least without letting the studios know to try to bid) is a terrible city manager.

[senois]

I was there about 8 years ago and I tought that all the forestery was national parks owned by the locals.Up where the wire bridge is and the river gourge is.
It would be a shame to destory all that.

[Krisz]

Stargate has always been filmed in and around Vancouver, using the same old forests and the same old sand pit.

However the reason the earlier series had allot more varied environments while series 8, 9 & 10 where mostly all the same Forest is due to the fact that Vancouver has apparently had loads of development's over the last 13 years. And allot of the locations and forests they filmed at in the early series have since been developed on, and turned into industrial estates.

The sand pit they had used for desert worlds like the Tok'ra homeworld, has apparently almost gone, as has that more open and rocky forest they use to use, and the Alpha site location have both gone.

These areas were closer to the studios in the earlier seasons and you are quite correct in that some have since been built on. Vancouver has seen a crazy spate of construction over the last few years. Condos and new housing developments were going up in every available space with the policy of urban densification. Vancouver is trying to avoid urban sprawl, plus there is only a certain amount of land given the geography of the area. All the gravel pits with the open rocky areas were all areas designated for development once the useful material had been removed for all the infrastructure projects that have been going on. Stargate only took advantage of the availability of these places before the building began.

Of course it costs more to go further from the studios and whilst these gravel pits and 'deserts' still exist they are generally too far to make the cost of location filming worth it. Local councils in Metro Vancouver such as where I live encourage productions to come to the areas with more rural and open lake and marshland locations with tax credits so that helps a lot. Logistical costs can be high for studio based productions so these still need to weigh up the financial aspect and that is why we tend to see more of the forest on Vancouver's North Shore. Some shows base themselves in the area they want to film in and rent local warehousing or industrial buildings to build indoor sets in. This saves money on maintaining studio buildings and facilities and location shooting costs.

Many of the locations used in Stargate are in actual parks, protected forests and agricultural land so will not be built on and lost to development.

Vancouver has become a victim of its own success and doing its best to balance the need for homes and industry, whilst preserving the beauty of the area that draws people and filming in the first place.