Silver screens and travel dreams

With the dominance of green screen and ever more impressive special effects, it’s easy to forget that the first films were shot outdoors. Roundhay Garden Scene (1888) – considered the very first film – was shot, as its name implies, in a leafy English garden. Other more famous films – like The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1896) – are studies of the outdoors. They were slices of “real” life – and of real places.

Put another way, the earliest filmmakers – like the legendary Lumière brothers – realized that movies and landscapes were inextricably linked. While Hollywood has always made liberal use of its hangars and studios – decorated with sumptuous painted backdrops – many of our most beautiful films and shows came about because location scouts packed their bags and headed out into the world.

They had their stories. Now they needed a set.

Fast forward to 2024 and landscape continues to play a huge role in the films we watch and the series we binge. We can’t separate The White Lotus from its (soon-to-be) trio of glamorous hotels. Nor can we disentangle Shogun from its misty, rain-wet landscapes which, despite being shot in Canada, live and breathe the ambience of Tokugawa-era Japan. Dune wouldn’t be Dune without Jordan’s Wadi Rum. The unspoken star of The Lord of the Rings is New Zealand. I could go on.

Years ago, we knew that people would want to seek out the locations of the series they so avidly follow; drawn by the allure of their on-screen depictions. That’s why, in 2014 – a decade ago – we created Set Jetting, a travel service that aimed to bring locations to life for fans who’d succumbed to their televised beauty. It was the first of its kind.

At the time, journalists and travelers alike caught on to the idea. For Isabel Berwick, writing in the Financial Times, “it’s a modern iteration of the literary pilgrimage”, albeit giving equal weight to fiction and fact. “You can’t see all of a city or country”, they wrote, “so why not concentrate on the places that already have meaning for you?”

Elsewhere, we spoke to the press about our Breaking Bad-inspired trip to New Mexico, of how we wanted to “really put a focus on this incredible destination”. It was an exploration of how these places (Croatia, Utah, Iceland, Rome) had inspired such compelling and memorable dramas. It was about getting “at” these places through the dramas that had been inspired by them.

Lifting ourselves from our sofas and cinema seats, we wanted to step inside our screens. Set Jetting struck a chord.

Sure, there’s a history to this. “Star tours” and studio visits are as old as Hollywood itself. But there’s something all too brief about these flying, camera-snapping visits. Surfaces are barely scratched; the crowd moves on.

Set Jetting has a different and deeper purpose. It’s about unpicking the relationship between places, landscapes and fiction. Did the Wild West only become the Wild West once we saw it – courtesy of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood – on the silver screen? Was it Richard Curtis who turned Notting Hill from an upper-crust neighborhood into a global phenomenon?

With our (ever-expanding) collection of Set Jetting destinations, we want to show travelers a closer and more immersive side to these pop-cultural locations; allowing them to poke around now the lighting rigs, generators and cameras have been packed away. To see Westeros, Downtown Abbey and Westworld as they really are, not as they seem to be.

There’s always been smoke and mirrors, of course. Kubrick fabricated a Vietnamese jungle in the fields of California. In Robocop, Dallas would stand in for Detroit.

What does this tell us? Perhaps that film and TV can achieve strange magic with the “raw” materials of the world – keeping us watching, drawing us closer.

If our first “season” aired a decade ago, Set Jetting is still going strong. And we’re about to add a whole new narrative arc.

“Ok, one more episode”.