Dhruv Trivedi
‘Resident Evil: Afterlife’ is the fourth installment of the popular video game-inspired ‘Resident Evil’ film franchise. The film has acclaimed writer Paul W. S. Anderson return to the director’s chair and continue Alice’s quest for revenge from the insidious Umbrella Corporation while battling hordes of zombies Following her from Tokyo to Alaska, to a freighter off the coast of LA, the movie’s blistering action takes place amid a variety of dramatic backdrops. If you’re wondering where the team from ‘Resident Evil: Afterlife’ filmed this installment of the cult favorite, we’ve got the info!
Resident Evil: Afterlife Filming Locations
‘Resident Evil: Afterlife’ opens in Japan and follows Alice to Alaska and California. In reality, most of these places were recreated in Ontario, Canada, where the film did the majority of its on-location and studio filming. Japan is also briefly featured in the film, and there are long scenes depicted on a freighter, which were shot in Ontario. The production team dispatched a second unit to Alaska to capture the establishing shots of the beautiful landscape.
Principal photography for the film started on September 29, 2009, and the crew used a sophisticated 3D camera system developed by James Cameron for filming the sci-fi epic ‘Avatar.’ Filming lasted roughly 55 days, out of which six days were spent filming the epic finale fight scene. Let’s take a closer look at the filming locations used in the movie.
Toronto, Ontario
Multiple locations around Ontario’s capital city of Toronto were used for on-location shoots. Its diverse architecture helped double Toronto up as LA, using the Robarts Library to depict a heavily fortified prison amid a decimated City of Angels. The library, part of the University of Toronto, is located at 130 St. George Street. Being one of the major locations in the film, extensive filming was done using the exterior of the building. A nearby gravel parking lot was used to film the massive explosions that destroy the building in the second half of the movie.
The almost 40-foot explosions had to be shot four times to be captured by the 3D cameras, and the film crew had to inform local authorities about the explosions for when they received calls from panicking residents. While filming in the Toronto harbor, the local police got hundreds of calls from concerned residents after a burning plane was seen crashing into a freighter. This, of course, was during the shooting of one of the movie’s iconic scenes featuring Kim Coates.
Scenes featuring Umbrella Corporation’s underground Tokyo lair were filmed at The Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy located on 144 College Street in the St. George Campus of The University of Toronto. The Pharmacy Building is known for its two massive orb-shaped classrooms, which were also used in the filming of several scenes.
Describing the process, Director Paul W. S. Anderson said that they filmed at night and then used visual effects to make all the surrounding glass walls look like concrete, giving the impression of a large underground space. Scenes featuring the interior of the “prison,” which is actually the Robarts Library, were filmed here as well as at the University of Toronto-Scarborough Campus located at 1265 Military Trail, Scarborough.
Studio filming for the movie, which included some of the initial Tokyo scenes, was undertaken at Cinespace Film Studios, located at 777 Kipling Ave #300 in the Etobicoke area of Toronto. Less than 40 miles from downtown Ontario is the Oshawa Municipal Airport, located at 1200 Airport Boulevard, Oshawa. The airport served as the site for filming the abandoned airplane graveyard in Alaska that Alice finds herself in as she looks for the survivors of the zombie apocalypse.
The dramatic scenes are followed by Alice running into her old ally Claire Redfield on a nearby beach. The Alaskan beach scene was shot just down the road from Oshawa in the Sandbanks Provincial Park at 3004 County Road 12, Picton. The beach is, in reality, the banks of Lake Ontario.
Tokyo, Japan
Tokyo, Japan, is featured briefly in the opening scenes of the movie, which depict the beginning of the T-virus apocalypse in the country. The scene takes place at the Shibuya Crossing, one of the busiest in the city, and showcases an initial zombie attack that causes panic amongst the crowds. In the following scene, we see a destroyed Shibuya crossing from many years on. This decimated version of the crossing was then filmed in the studio.
Read More: Where Was Resident Evil: Extinction Filmed?
