Video Production in Glendale, CA

An airport that became Imagineering, and 522 feet of Verdugo

Glendale filed its first plat on 11 March 1887 and incorporated on 15 February 1906, the same year Forest Lawn opened. Grand Central Airport followed in 1929, became the city's largest employer, trained pilots through the Second World War and closed in 1959. Walt Disney bought the land in 1961 and put Walt Disney Imagineering on it, which is why this city has been an engineering and design town rather than a shooting town ever since.

Animation is the local industry. Disneytoon, Marvel Animation and DreamWorks Animation have all worked out of Glendale, and in the 1930s the Alex Theatre, opened in 1925, was where Disney test screened its cartoons before release. That history matters to a client here, because the buyer in Glendale usually understands post production timelines better than the average marketing department.

The city runs 30.48 square miles of land at 522 feet, sitting in the Verdugo Mountains with the Glendale Narrows of the Los Angeles River along its southern edge, bordered by Pasadena and Eagle Rock east, Burbank and Griffith Park west, and the La Crescenta foothills north. Elevation change inside the city is severe enough that a hillside street gives you a downtown skyline over a rooftop in one frame. The Catalina Verdugo Adobe, begun in 1828, is the oldest building in town, and the 1925 six story beaux arts Hotel Glendale and the 1934 Renaissance Revival post office give a period exterior without leaving the flats. Most of what we shoot here is corporate video, testimonial work and campus recruiting for the design, health and education employers.

Brand Park, a teahouse and the animation campuses

Glendale's location list is stronger than its reputation, because the city has spent a century being an engineering town rather than a shooting town and the buildings were left alone.

El Miradero, the 1904 mansion at the heart of Brand Park, is the anchor, with a Japanese teahouse on the grounds and a restored Richfield gas station nearby. The Catalina Verdugo Adobe, begun in 1828, is the oldest building in the city. The Alex Theatre opened in 1925 and was where Disney test screened cartoons in the 1930s. Hotel Glendale, six storeys of beaux arts from 1925, and the 1934 Renaissance Revival post office give period exterior without leaving the flats.

Terrain does the rest. The city runs 30.48 square miles at 522 feet, sitting in the Verdugo Mountains with the Glendale Narrows of the Los Angeles River along the southern edge. Elevation change inside the city is severe enough that a hillside street can hold a downtown skyline over a rooftop in a single frame, which is a shot Burbank cannot give you.

Forest Lawn opened here in 1906 and Walt Disney is interred in it. Grand Central Airport, which ran from 1929 to 1959 and trained pilots through the war, became Walt Disney Imagineering in 1961.

That history explains the buyers. Animation, design, healthcare and education dominate, and they commission corporate video, testimonial work and recruiting films rather than street spots.

The Parks Department names what it has hosted

Most cities describe themselves as film friendly. Glendale's Community Services & Parks Department publishes a list of productions it has actually hosted in city parks and community buildings: the Criminal Minds television series, Moneyball, Downsizing, Glad commercials, the Bones television series, music videos and other projects.

That is a city department naming titles on its own site, not a location marketplace making a claim. The same page states its parks and locations can accommodate feature films, commercials, music videos, public service announcements, still photo shoots, reality television series, documentaries, director's reels and student films.

El Miradero, a teahouse and a Richfield gas station

Brand Park at 1601 West Mountain Street is open 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. and holds the Brand Library & Art Center, housed in El Miradero, the mansion Leslie Brand built in 1904. The city describes the architecture as Saracenic, with crenellated arches, bulbous domes and minars combining Spanish, Moorish and Indian characteristics, modelled on the East Indian Pavilion from the 1893 Columbian World Exposition. The same park holds the Miradero Gateway archway, the gated Brand Family Cemetery, and the Statue of Miss American Green Cross, a ten-foot bronze by Frederick Willard Potter dedicated in 1928. Also in Brand Park is the Shoseian Whispering Pine Teahouse and Friendship Garden, built in 1974 by the Sister Cities of Glendale and Higashi-Osaka, which the city calls one of the few traditional Japanese teahouses open to the public in the United States, beside a koi pond at the foot of the Verdugo Mountains.

Elsewhere the inventory runs period rather than pretty. Casa Adobe de San Rafael at 1330 Dorothy Drive is California Landmark No. 235, built around 1870 by Tomas Sanchez, a former sheriff of Los Angeles County, with a Monterey-style covered corridor, a sunken garden and 19th century furnishings on 1.6 acres. The Catalina Verdugo Adobe at 2211 Bonita Drive is California Historical Landmark No. 637 and, the city says, the oldest structure in Glendale; its grounds hold the remnants of the Oak of Peace, where terms were agreed in January 1847 ahead of the Treaty of Cahuenga. Adams Square Mini Park at 1020 E. Palmer Avenue was built around the 1936 Streamline Moderne Adams Square Gas Station, originally a Richfield Oil station, added to the Glendale Register on December 8, 2015.

Two more worth naming. The city's facility directory lists The Alex Theatre at 216 N. Brand Blvd., owned by the City of Glendale, operated by SAS, capacity 1,400. Deukmejian Wilderness Park, a City of Glendale park at 3429 Markridge Road, holds the Le Mesnager Stone Barn: begun in 1905 with winery storage on the ground floor, completed in 1915, gutted by fire in 1933 and rebuilt with living quarters upstairs.

Education, healthcare, animation and software

The city's economic development site publishes that Glendale is home to 1,500 tech companies employing over 20,000 people, that more than 112 foreign-owned enterprises have invested here, and that Glendale is the fourth largest city in Los Angeles County. Its landing page counts more than 12,000 businesses.

The employer list backs that up without a single dominant sector. As of the city's FY2019 principal employers schedule, the largest employers named are Glendale Unified School District, Glendale Adventist Medical Center, the City of Glendale, DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc and NBC Universal, Glendale Community College, Glenair Inc, Dignity Health Glendale Memorial Hospital, USC Verdugo Hills Hospital, Age of Learning and ServiceTitan. The schedule's own note calculates against a baseline of 103,200 workers employed in Glendale, from EDD data. Two school systems, three hospitals, an animation studio and two software companies, as of that year.

ServiceTitan reports its principal executive offices to the Securities and Exchange Commission at 800 N. Brand Blvd., Suite 100. That mix is why Glendale briefs skew toward corporate and internal communications work and recruitment content rather than toward stage-based production.

The Verdugo side of the 134

Forest Lawn's Glendale park at 1712 S Glendale Ave has been a Southern California landmark since 1906, with an art museum, the Hall of the Crucifixion-Resurrection and three on-site churches. It is privately owned, so any shoot there is a private location agreement layered on top of the FilmLA permit, not a park booking.

From Westlake Village the route runs US-101 east to SR-134 east, roughly 33 miles and 40 to 60 minutes as a routing estimate rather than a published figure. Burbank borders Glendale and runs an entirely separate office on a Monday to Thursday week. Pasadena sits east on the 134 with its own Film Office and its own caps. The Los Angeles County overview sets out which authority holds which city. For brands working a Glendale street rather than a park, the shoot usually resolves into a single commercial day sized deliberately under the ten-person threshold.