PA's Environment "Perfect" For Post-Apocalyptic Movie

Pennsylvania's unreclaimed abandoned mines and gob piles and abandoned city blocks in Pittsburgh became the "perfect" backdrop for the post-apocalyptic movie The Road due to open in theaters shortly. Here's what the Wikipedia entry has to say--
With a budget of $20 million, filming began in southwestern Pennsylvania in late February 2008 for eight weeks and moved on to Louisiana and Oregon. Pennsylvania, where most of the filming took place, was chosen for its tax breaks and its abundance of locations that looked post-apocalyptic: coalfields, dunes, and run-down parts of Pittsburgh. Filming was also done at the 1892 Amusement park (Conneaut Lake Park) after one of the parks buildings (the Dreamland Ballroom) was destroyed in a fire in February 2008. Hillcoat also said of using Pittsburgh as a practical location, "It's a beautiful place in fall with the colors changing, but in winter, it can be very bleak. There are city blocks that are abandoned. The woods can be brutal. We didn't want to go the CGI world." Filmmakers also shot scenes in parts of New Orleans that had been ravaged by Hurricane Katrina and on Mount St. Helens in Washington.
Hillcoat sought to make the film faithful to the spirit of the book, creating "a world in severe trauma", although never explaining the circumstances of the apocalyptic event. According to Hillcoat, "That's what makes it more realistic, then it immediately becomes about survival and how you get through each day as opposed to what actually happened." Filmmakers took advantage of days with bad weather to portray the post-apocalyptic environment. Mark Forker, the director of special effects for the film, sought to make the landscape convincing, handling sky replacement and digitally removing greenery from scenes.
The Abandoned Pennsylvania Turnpike was used for much of production, with evidence shown at the eastern portal of the Sideling Hill Tunnel. The exterior of the tunnel was somewhat restored for filming, with the doors to the ventilation shaft repainted as well as the white paint near the base of the tunnel entrance being painted tan to match the rest of the exterior of the tunnels. (When the property was still owned by the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, vandalism took place on the abandoned tunnels sometime in the 1980s, with the white paint used to cover up graffiti.) The same was done with the western portal to Sideling Hill as well as the eastern portal of the Rays Hill Tunnel.
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