Film Edinburgh Apr-May Round Up

BBC Scotland spent two days filming in the city for new Edinburgh-set Guilt, while Edinburgh will again feature in Bollywood with the filming of Jatt Bhatt Juliet in South Queensferry and Victoria Street. In the Scottish Borders, long-running ITV series Vera, starring award-winning actress Brenda Blethyn, spent a few days filming along the Berwickshire coast.

Edinburgh’s place in Britain’s railway network featured twice, with the filming of Great British Railway Journeys, featuring the Dominion Cinema, Scottish Parliament Building and Calton Hill and in Channel 5’s Walking Britain’s Lost Railways, which sees presenter Rob Bell walk the routes of closed railway lines. Waverley Station was featured, alongside Calton Hill and Princes Street Gardens.

Princes Street Gardens and Calton Hill also saw filming for the BBC’s Points of View alongside the Mound and Royal Mile, while The Yard was revisited for a follow-up edition of DIY SOS. A BBC Scotland documentary about the life of Robert Burns brought filmmakers to Arniston House and various sites across the city centre including St Giles Cathedral.

In April, Film Edinburgh and City of Edinburgh Council hosted a drone filming briefing event for Edinburgh city region-based drone operators to find out about the city’s new drone filming policy.

May saw the Head of Film Edinburgh, Rosie Ellison, present at the University of Glasgow’s cultural tourism symposium Constructing Place: it was gratifying to see academic interest in the positive impact of our sector.

On the locations-front, we registered and visited six new potential filming locations across Edinburgh, East Lothian and the Borders to add to our database: two stately homes, three residential homes and a cattery, giving an idea of the range of locations we’re interested in. If you own a property of any kind that you would like added to our filming locations database, you can find out more here.

The DVD release of Outlander Season 4 sees Edinburgh’s Arniston House and Newhailes featured, both of which are now included in VisitScotland’s updated Outlander locations map alongside Bakehouse Close, Hopetoun/Midhope, Tweeddale Court, Craigmillar Castle, the Signet Library, Preston Mill and Gosford. In a demonstration of the positive impact film tourism can have, VisitScotland has reported that visits to locations featured in Outlander have increased by 67% to 1.5million/year since the series first aired.

The release of Avengers: Endgame led to a surge in online searches for flights to New Asgard. St Abbs, which plays ‘New Asgard’ in the film, is just an hour from Edinburgh and has even seen black taxi cabs bringing passengers from the city. The village now boasts ‘St Abbs twinned with New Asgard’ road signs and St Abbs Lifeboats are selling tee-shirts reminding us all who the real superheroes are.