After exploring Universal CityWalk Hollywood yesterday evening and then spending the night at the Sheraton Universal Hotel, I woke up (relatively) early this morning for my VIP Experience tour at Universal Studios Hollywood today.
I have enough photographs from the tour that I decided it would make sense to split it up into two separate blog posts. I’ll give my general overview of the VIP Experience tomorrow, but for today, I decided to focus specifically on the Studio Tour.
The Studio Tour starts in one of the lower areas of the theme park near the back. We descended down this escalator tunnel towards the entrance.
The wait time for a tour was 25 minutes…
… but our VIP Experience admission allowed us to skip the line and get directly onto a special bus.
One of the first stops was at a sound stage. Although this one was empty and not actively being used to film a production at that time, we were still able to see all the soundproofing and some of the tools they use to hook up the lights, cameras, and other equipment.
Outside the sound stages, we were able to see some trailers where actors, actresses, and other stars are able to rest between shooting sessions and get touch-ups on their hair and make-up.
The next part of the tour brought us to multiple different backlots, which are outdoor locations where scenes are filmed. As expected, they had a lot of backlots, all resembling the architecture of different countries and time periods.
As a quick intermission, we entered a building that was disguised as a sound stage, but was actually a 3D immersive experience based on King Kong.
The 3D glasses made it seem like King Kong and various dinosaurs were jumping right up to our faces. The bus inconspicuously drove up on a track that locked it in place and swung it around side-to-side, so it felt like we were actually being picked up and thrown around in sync with the visuals. They also added mist effects for even more immersion.
I don’t know if this is just because I haven’t really gone to amusement parks or ridden on many roller coasters so I don’t know how far the technology has come, but this was my favorite part of my entire visit to Universal Studios. I thought this immersive experience was amazing. I did not expect the immersion to be this advanced, and if there are more 3D experiences like this, I’d be happy just going on them back-to-back for my theme park trip.
Unfortunately, even though I took a few photographs, none of them were worthy of being shared because they were all very blurry due to the high amounts of motion, and the contents of the pictures were unidentifiable due to my camera lens obviously not having a 3D attachment on it.
After King Kong, we drove past some other sound stages and into even more backlots.
For our second intermission from looking at backlots, we entered another immersive sound stage. Although this one wasn’t 3D, it was still fun—it emulated what would happen during a catastrophic earthquake where the infrastructure fails and we enter a pseudo-apocalyptic state.
I don’t have too many photos to share from this one either, again due to the blurriness from the motion and the bus rocking back and forth in unison with the destruction that was happening around us, but I did manage to capture this one of a tanker truck that had fallen through a collapsed concrete floor and set off a fire.
After coming out of that sound stage, we went through some backlot sets that were designed to serve a greater purpose than just a backdrop for filming. For example, this one was rigged to dump out a substantial amount of water to emulate a flood.
We saw some more backlots and learned that apparently the ground on some of these is fake. Our tour guide said that most of it is just asphalt, and there are companies that specialize in moving in large amounts of dirt, sand, snow, or whatever else is needed for a filming session to cover the ground in the applicable material before removing it when they need to redress the backlot.
Having grown up in the Chicagoland suburbs, suburban neighborhoods are so common that it did not occur to me that they still need to make suburban backlots to have a controlled environment in which to film shows and movies that take place in the suburbs. It was very amusing to see what is basically an entire fake subdivision here.
Here is a collection of some famous vehicles that were used in various different shows and films.
As part of Jaws’ 50th anniversary, they had a fake themed Hollywood sign at the end of one of the roads on the Studio Tour. I don’t think it served any particular purpose; it seemed like it was just there as a decorative piece.
We drove right up to what I believe they referred to as the Chicken Ranch house. I’m not familiar with any of the movies that were filmed on this set, but I suspect they were in the horror genre, as there was an actor with a fake knife there that ran up to our tour bus right as we drove off.
As one of the final areas we saw as part of our tour, we got a close-up look at a plane crash scene used for War of the Worlds (2005), consisting of a real Boeing 747 airliner disassembled and strewn around for the set.
As we circled back to the beginning and towards the conclusion of our Studio Tour, we passed by an area that was closed for active filming. I’m not sure if this meant a portion of the tour was cut short, but even then, the it was already very thorough and comprehensive.
About a year and a half ago, I went on a comparable tour of Sony Pictures Studios. My feedback of Sony’s tour was that it was fairly underwhelming and a bit uninteresting for someone who isn’t really too passionate about movies.
With that being said, and even with the same context, I thought the Studio Tour at Universal Studios was great. It is clear that they iterated on the tour to make sure it is as optimally exciting and captivating as possible. It was also satisfyingly long and had a wide variety of things to enjoy (including some things that were off-limits for photographs that I did not include in this blog post, such as a warehouse of props, some of which were tagged with code names to be reserved for upcoming use in films).
I think the tour guides were also far better at Universal Studios, both in terms of their knowledge about the topic and the way in which the program was run. The tour guides provided commentary about what we were seeing in a way that catered to people of all degrees of interest.
Prior to the tour, the guides asked us all what our favorite shows were, and it was clear that they remembered our answers because they made sure to focus on and point out those areas of interests on the tour to ensure the tour was made more relevant for that particular set of people. Even for someone like me who doesn’t really watch TV or movies much, the tour allowed me to appreciate the general cinematography, technology, and logistics behind film production without ever needing to be a fan of a particular series or franchise.
I’m not sure how much of this Studio Tour experience was enhanced as a result of having a VIP ticket, and I don’t know what the differences are (if any) between this VIP Experience Studio Tour and the one that is offered to general admission attendees, but based on what I saw, I think this would be a great sightseeing addition to your day at Universal Studios as a break between going on rides across the rest of the theme park.