2. Location, Location, Location! From Local Colour to Location Placement and Sustainability: The Importance of Location in Television Drama Productions

In relation to the political–democratic rationale in screen productions, I will emphasise three distinct but interrelated sets of values, respectively: public service, local colour, and geopolitics. Public-service media is based on democratic ideals about representation of regional and minority culture, people and politics, and in many cases, there is also regional and local production infrastructure including broadcasters, channels and hubs. Local colour and regional aesthetics in film and literature encompassed another but still related political and aesthetic ideal about representing and empowering local and regional stories and culture (Hedling, Hedling & Jönsson 2010; Chow, 2016). The geopolitical rationale in this context includes scriptwriters and screen producers that critically raise questions about places and political and societal conditions in their film and series. Other examples that illustrate the political-democratic rationale for emphasising location as a distinct value in screen productions are the regional film funds, minority television channels, or the use of ‘Euroscapes’ in crime series to reflect political–democratic conditions across Europe (Caius & Waade, 2023). However, my main concern here is not to be all-encompassing, but rather to emphasise that the way locations are reflected in and influence screen productions draws in many cases on certain sets of rationales; and in these cases, the rationales exemplify political–democratic values.

Public service media (PSM) is a set of values, but it is also a way of publicly organising and funding national media content production and distribution. Public service media takes different forms in different conditions and its cultural impact depends on the country and the region under consideration. In the Nordic region, PSM is funded by public money: it has a broad reach, encompassing factual and fictional entertainment, news, documentaries and public affairs (Syvertsen et al., 2014; Lowe & Martin, 2014). As a democratic and public institution, PSM is committed to securing regional representation and relevance, and also cultural and societal diversity. Mirroring the demographic diversity and sparsely populated geographical peripheries of the Nordic context, the representation of different rural areas and intranational regions has been an important cultural political principle. For PSMs, this means that we have local production facilities in the main cities across the country and that there are specific regulations and ideals on covering local news and content as well as representing different cultures, languages and locations. This distributed and regionally organised production facilities and funding system also applies in the Nordic film industry, despite the fact that we are talking about quite small markets. Regarding locations, PSMs’ regional programming ambition encompasses both representation and production. In Denmark, the commercial broadcaster TV2 is based on public-service commitments when it comes to drama series; TV2 typically produce crime and drama series that are set in the provinces (Funen, Jutland), co-financed by local funds.

Local colour is often used in everyday conversation, indicating that specific places have a certain style, atmosphere and features. In The Oxford English Dictionary (2024), local colour is defined as ‘the customs, manners of speech, dress, or other typical features of a place or period’. In previous work, I have discussed local colour in relation to Nordic noir (Hansen & Waade, 2017), drawing on the work of Kapor (2008), who describes the term as a core concept within art history, philosophy and literature that can be traced back to classic and romantic artistic ideals within landscape painting and pictorial art. Kapor explains how local colour in the seventeenth century was related to French pictorial art, indicating ‘a precise technical meaning relating to the theory of colouring and perspective in painting’ (ibid: 39); later it developed during the romantic period to favour picturesque detail (manners, dress, scenery and so forth) that reproduced a distinctive and lively image of a country, region, or bygone era (ibid: 41). Kapor also argues that another meaning of the term occurs in the American local colour movement in the twentieth century, where it gave rise to a political agenda to preserve the record of regions and dying local traditions. Finally, Kapor’s work also points to a third way of understanding the term, indicating methods of representing and reproducing the spirit of a particular place at a particular time. This understanding is in line with the way we use the term in everyday conversations today and may sometimes include stereotypical thinking and unconscious reproductions of common ideas related to specific places and cultures. As such, local colour, in some contexts, has been used as a political ideal to strengthen and mobilise regions and local engagement, but most often and in everyday conversations it typically draws on stereotypical ideas about certain places, periods and cultures.

Studies in geopolitical screen studies apply human geography and international relations to film and television narratives; as a consequence, they tend to focus on locations in screen productions. Saunders (2019, 2021) is an example of this emphasis when he looks at the geopolitical implications of screened places, for example borders, regions, nations, and private places. In many crime series, these geopolitical conditions and implications work as thematic and dramaturgic concepts. Saunders presents a typology of ‘Small Screen IR’ (2019) in which he distinguishes between various kinds of geographical locations that interplay with the crime narrative: exotic–irrealist locations, parliamentary–domestic, procedural–localised, historical–revisionist and speculative–fantastic. To give an example of local colour and its stereotypical and geopolitical implications, the Swedish television crime series Midnight Sun (SVT and Canal + 2016) is of relevance. The series is set in Kiruna, a mining city in the northern part of Sweden, representing a multicultural community including Sápmi, Swedes and Finns, together with miners, climate activists and international industry investors. The local colour of Kiruna encompasses the impressive icy mountains characterising Nordic noir, the dark subterranean mining areas and the colourful Sápmi costumes set in picturesque landscapes. Parallel to this story, the viewer follows a female police officer from Paris, Kahina Zadi, who is investigating the murder of a French citizen in Kiruna. Having grown up in Marseilles with a Berber–Algerian background, her mixed cultural and religious origins, as well as her punishment by her parents when she became pregnant as a teenager, have caused deep trauma. As such, she represents another historical ethnic and geopolitical conflict that mirrors the complex situation in Kiruna. The Sápmi noid (shaman) helps the Swedish and the French police to solve the crime based on her local knowledge and witchcraft.

The series demonstrates a triple narrative premise that includes several levels of spatial representation: the setting (where the action takes place), the society (to which the critical plot refers), and the cinematic landscape (spectacular landscape imageries that work as visual style not directly related to the plot) (Waade, 2020). For television drama productions, the decisive question is whether the triple premise is well balanced so as to avoid stereotypical representations of local communities, race and gender and not try to sell and tell stories that are based on purely touristic imageries and visual clichés. Midnight Sun works well to an extent and it is possible to follow the societal–critical engagement related to the multicultural conditions and the climate conflicts in the northern part of Scandinavia, but the series also includes stereotypical representations and exoticisms. Because the series is a Swedish–French co-production, it is targeted at international sales, something that the spectacular use of landscape imageries and cultural stereotypes makes manifest (Fig. 2.2).

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Since the 1990s, a new interest in the relation between locations and screen production has developed, with the creative industry being seen as bringing economic value to a city or a region. In the early 2000s, Richard Florida’s pivotal work on the creative class and how cities known for their cultural production attract investors, inhabitants and tourists was picked up by city authorities across the world. In this period, we see a general change in the cultural political rationale, from investing public money in art and culture primarily to protect and strengthen national or regional identity, to considering art and cultural production as ways to secure economic growth. Location in this context is primarily the site of production. The term cultural and creative industries (CCI) is linked to this economic–industrial rationale, in which culture and screen productions are considered ways of creating economic value and growth in society. For the screen industry, this change also led to a new interest in clustering screen production as part of regional development strategies (Karlsson & Picard, 2011; Krätke, 2011; Komorowski, 2016). New media hubs popped up in cities and regions outside the national centres and capitals. Developing sustainable regional screen industry hubs has typically included building local production infrastructure, with studios, technical and practical facilities, training expertise and local funding opportunities, as well as developing political and economic strategies that will attract production from abroad or from outside the region. The idea was that a growing creative sector could help to create work within not just the creative sector, but the service sector as well. Furthermore, establishing regional media hubs also attracted investors, inhabitants, and tourists; it was used to create media attention and to brand the city or the region.

In parallel with the shifting political climate in the early 2000s, the European media landscape experienced radical changes taking place outside the traditional national centres of media and cultural production—institutionally, politically and geographically—with new cluster formations; the disruption of traditional media business models; new digital technologies and the emergence of new drivers in production; and new modes of collaboration across sectors. Traditionally, media/cultural production and collaboration have in many ways been limited to and often determined by a specific geography, focused on the centre/capital and designated institutional settings; they were characterised by top down, rigid funding structures; and by a level of professional protectionism and production practices typical of legacy media such as newspapers, broadcast media, books and cinema. However, the media and cultural landscape is increasingly being defined by new geographies that go beyond (and even against) the centre and such traditional, often dominant institutions, rely on new sources of funding, and create new labour conditions. These trends are often the result of new and emerging drivers in the cultural economy, which reflect a desire to regenerate alternative urban centres (Comunian, Chapain & Clifton, 2010), to increase competitiveness and the pace of innovation, and to stimulate new creative industries and employment practices as a source of growth and jobs. The CCI approach emphasised economic value and the concepts of innovation, flexible labour and economic impact (Flew, 2012); as such it represented a new mindset and a new way of valuing media and cultural production that differed from traditional concepts embodied in legacy media, which prioritised democratic values, public service, preserving and regulating national identity and culture (Syvertsen, 2014).

One example is MediaCityUK (Drake & Spicer, 2026). After the BBC’s relocation of selected departments in the UK in 2011, MediaCityUK was established in Salford, Greater Manchester. The city has grown as a media hub, attracting commercial broadcasting, digital services, studio and postproduction facilities and media education. Another example is Media City Bergen (MCB) in Norway, established in 2017 and part of the Norwegian Innovation Clusters programme. MCB encompasses national public and private media, editorial and news outlets, and international technology companies, with the University of Bergen as the academic partner. The aim was to develop an internationally competitive knowledge and innovation cluster. Another, smaller, cluster is FilmCity Aarhus in western Denmark, encompassing public and commercial companies producing games, animation, digital design, marketing, and audiovisual content. This cluster focuses on new innovative collaborations with partners outside the sector including from health, construction and tourism, as well as cultural institutions and events. The clusters differ in scale, funding, and production, but they share the same ambition—to foster entrepreneurship, creative thinking, and partnerships—as well as the overall aim of serving as new drivers of local cultural economy. These media hubs are sites of production, and as such they represent locations in screen production; but with the regional and local interest, they also bring new ways of selecting, displaying, and representing film locations on screen (Chow, 2021).

Following the economic–industrial rationale for emphasising locations in screen production, we have also experienced an increasing awareness of locations as selling points, with locations chosen, displayed, and marketed with a view to selling the film or the television series and to selling places, cities and destinations. It is clearly an economic rationale but also includes some distinct aesthetic and representational ideas. These ideas of location as selling point include two different strategies or sets of interests: firstly, the choice and use of specific locations can be used as a selling point for series or films, or alternatively, they can be used to sell specific places and tourist destinations. Location placement as a branding strategy illustrates the second of these strategies, in which cities, tourist destinations, or regions invest money in a specific screen production to market and brand their place.

It may be claimed that this is nothing new. We are all familiar with blockbuster movies such as the James Bond series, stately homes in romantic drama, or actual cities in crime series, for example Oxford in Inspector Morse (1987–2000), in which the chosen locations have become part of the brand itself and are used extensively in marketing (Bucks, 2024). But what we see is the increasing use of locations as selling points, together with a new understanding of the value that locations can bring to the media product, as well as to the places that are chosen as setting and shooting locations. Nordic noir is a good example of this trend. In the following I will use Nordic noir as an example to illuminate this shift in rationale. First, I will dwell on some of the plausible reasons for why we are experiencing a growing interest in locations in screen productions; secondly, give some examples of, respectively, screen tourism, location placement and cross-sectoral collaborations that this interest in location as selling point has caused and at the same time are caused by; thirdly, I will look at locations not only as market-strategic and popular elements in screen productions, but also as a creative concept in the production process, a kind of site-specific television drama in the same way that we are familiar with site-specific artistic works within the visual and performing arts.

Television drama has been used for strategic reasons by broadcasters, channels, distributors and, more recently, streaming services to navigate an increasingly competitive international market. Drama has become a sales driver, as Steemers (2016) explains, with investments in high-end drama forming part of a strategy to reach out to viewers and foreign television markets with the aim of becoming visible, attracting funding, securing market share and selling licences (Lotz, 2014). In this process, television drama productions acquired cinematic aesthetic standards, including the use of expensive cameras, music, complex storytelling, popular actors and internationally acknowledged directors and creatives. This also included more significant choices about shooting locations and camera use, including panoramas, fly-cams, and expensive camera technologies (Creeber, 2004).

Nordic noir has been considered high-end drama. Following the popularity of Scandinavian crime fiction, Nordic noir became a popular brand that travelled worldwide, with a particular appeal to well-educated viewers of forty years old and upwards (Waade et al., 2020). It became famous for its strong female characters, its realistic settings, acting, and storytelling, and not least for its Nordic landscapes, climate conditions and design and architecture in the framing (Roberts, 2016; Hansen & Waade, 2017). The Nordic locations are emphasised in the promotional material, in the series titles, in the title sequences, and in the stories themselves: for example, the Öresund bridge in The Bridge (2011–18), Greenland in Thin Ice (2020), or the Swedish west coast in The Fjallbacka Murders. International broadcasters, producers and streaming services outside the Nordic region even started producing their own Nordic noir series by including Nordic locations or choosing locations that looked Nordic (Turnbull, 2014; McElroy & Noonan, 2019). Arctic noir then developed as a subgenre, with a distinct use of icy mountains, cold permafrost climate, darkness, and snow and glaciers in the foreground. Parallel to this international interest in Nordic noir, a similar taste for anything Nordic was seen in popular culture and politics in Western and anglophone cultures, whether this was about the Nordic welfare state, the region’s gender politics, its nature, or because they are reputed to be the happiest (and wealthiest) people in the world. As such, locations in Nordic noir must be seen in this broader context as having acquired distinct market values and selling points.

Looking at locations as selling points in screen productions, the development of screen tourism as a separate creative industry and tourism culture is also interesting. International attention to film tourism as something that attracts tourists and has the potential to build profit for destinations and local tourism agencies was in many ways linked to the Lord of the Rings film trilogy back in the early 2000s and the impressive development of film tourism in New Zealand in this context (Tzanelli, 2004; Beeton, 2005; Champion et al., 2023). That success was the outcome of close collaboration across local tourism organisations, local authorities and the local film industry, with its director, Peter Jackson, as the lead figure and, not least, Air New Zealand as the main sponsor for coordinating marketing campaigns, hosting events and initiating film tour operators. Since then, we have seen many new film tourism destinations popping up, most of them linked to locations used in internationally popular film and television series such as Game of Thrones (2011–19), Sex and the City (1998–2004), and The Da Vinci Code (2006). This is mainly because these blockbusters have so many viewers worldwide, as well extensive marketing budgets (Månsson, 2010). However, screen tourism is not restricted to Western anglophone markets; it has become a global cultural phenomenon (Sangkyun & Reijnders, 2018) (Fig. 2.3).

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Screen tourism research has grown as a significant field of enquiry within tourism studies, but only recently has it been picked up by media and film scholars (Bonelli & Leotta 2021). From a media studies point of view, screen tourism is of relevance not only as a cultural phenomenon, but also as a prism through which to study fandom, cross-sectoral cooperation, and funding strategies for screen productions. Furthermore, and with Nordic noir still in mind, studying screen tourism is important in small markets too—beyond the international blockbusters, the globally powerful media giants and anglophone markets. We have recently seen many creative and collaborative initiatives that fit these small markets; new technologies also make it possible to create screen tourism that is not dependent on huge investment or global blockbusters. One example was the Detect Aarhus GPS-based tourism app, which we developed in collaboration with a local software developer and Visit Aarhus, in a study I conducted with Bengesser (2021). We based the content of the app on film and television series that had been shot in Aarhus: tourists were offered three different walking tours which they could follow. It was a prototype, which we tested on tourists and international students. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, challenged the testing process, and following the research project it turned out not to be possible to get the prototype adopted under commercial conditions at the time.

Location placement is a branded content strategy in line with product placement and brand placement, in which nations, regions, or cities invest money and resources to place their location in an international screen production to promote and brand their city, region, or country (Hardy, 2022). For example, Visit Northern Ireland and Northern Ireland Screen worked strategically to persuade the producers of Game of Thrones to be filmed in Northern Ireland, and they used the series to develop local collaboration and destination development. The local screen agencies are intermediaries that initiate location placement; but they are also public institutions that work towards international commercial screen producers, and they also work to attract international screen productions to the region (McElroy & Noonan, 2022). In this business, locations not only become selling points for screen products and destinations; they also become commodities. LocationExpo is one of several location events and location markets in the United States in which film commissionaires from all over the world exhibit and promote their film locations in order to try to sell their places and promote tax incentives, production facilities and local knowhow. As such, film locations are in themselves commodities that are traded on the screen industry market. LocationExpo’s website states:

The world’s best locations, incentives, facilities and services. Welcome to LocationEXPO at the American Film Market! When you attend LocationEXPO you will meet with Film Commissions, Locations, Production Facilities and Services from around the world that can quickly get your film moving. Together they offer billions of dollars in production incentives. (LocationExpo 2024, website)

Of course, this type of event only works when you have international markets and big, powerful players. In a Nordic context, we have seen a few online location catalogues, but with small-scale recourses, it can be difficult to maintain and keep these catalogues updated. Most often, information about possible locations is typically shared between a location scout and a person from the local authority or the community.

While location as selling point is still based on an economic and market-strategic rationale, and as such is closely connected to the rationales behind regional development and media clustering strategies that I have outlined, this fourth rationale—Green screen—introduces a different and more critical viewpoint. The new environmentally concerned agenda that we have recently seen developing in popular culture, politics, activism and research—just as we also see it in cultural production, art and everyday life—also informs and influences new practices and ideals within the screen industry, as well as in screen studies. In this context, the location of screen productions will be valued and reconsidered in quite new ways. My view is that, so far, we have only seen the very beginning of this new era. In the following I will firstly introduce the new eco-media research agenda in this context, and, based on this, look at new practices and guidelines for screen productions that affect the way locations are used. Next, I will elaborate green-screen representations and give a couple of examples. When it comes to the relation between screen industry and climate, there are clearly two different perspectives. On the one side, this is about considering sustainability in the industry itself; on the other side, it is about telling stories and producing content that deal with climate and environmental issues, about the way these stories are told and presented. As such, rethinking locations in screen productions in light of climate and geopolitics means relating off-screen conditions to on-screen features in the same way as the location studies model does. My third green screen rationale will look at drone technologies in the screen industry and discuss to what extent this technology can make a change, both in greening off-screen conditions and in greening on-screen features.

Eco-media studies focus on how media and cultural productions represent and engage with ecological and environmental issues (Gustafsson & Kääpä, 2013; Kääpä, 2014; López et al., 2024). This field developed in the 2010s through analysing the emergence of ecocritical narratives in popular media, most often through textual analysis. The focus here is on the ways that media narratives shape and are shaped by environmental discourses, exploring the cultural, social and political implications of these representations. While the on-screen perspective has grown with the increased focus on climate issues, it is only relatively recently that an industry perspective has been integrated with a focus on the industry’s own carbon footprint, environmental management and legislation (Kääpä, 2018). Sørensen and Noonan argue that one of the main challenges for the screen sector will be how it ‘balances the demands of environmental responsibility with market-based logics, the cultural rationales for national cinema and sustaining professional livelihood in the sector’ (Sørensen & Noonan, 2022: 177). As such, rethinking locations in this context is not only a new way of producing popular ‘green’ content that will attract viewers and buyers but might also include radical ways of rethinking and downscaling the screen industry in general. As a field of study and research approach, eco-media studies are part of environmental humanities, a rapidly growing field that includes themed conferences, journals (e.g. Journal of Environmental Media Studies), handbooks and international research collaboration. My interest in this context is in bringing location studies and eco-media studies together by drawing on work being done within Anthropocene and geopolitical screen studies in order to understand more completely the complex relation between media content, media production and culture in general (Saunders, 2021).

If we consider the screen industry and off-screen production practices, we see that many new sets of guidelines for sustainable screen productions are being developed. Sørensen and Noonan (2022: 174) explain how ‘the production and distribution of screen content are dependent on the services of some of the most wasteful and polluting industries in the world’ such as fashion, transport, energy and technology. For example, art departments have traditionally used single-use props, costumes and sets, location shoots have often included diesel generators and transport and catering have often been provided by third parties not under the direct control of a specific production manager. Recently, however, we have seen a range of new initiatives encompassing carbon calculators, certification schemes, and resources and toolkits (ibid., 175). Many of these schemes and resources are still related to single productions only and no economic repercussions or sanctions are applied when targets are not met. If we look at locations in screen productions, this new environmental attention might exclude the use of shooting locations that are endangered or critically affected by the production and finding other locations or avoiding on-location shooting instead. The authentic, exotic, iconic or in other ways fascinating locations that have such an appeal for viewers might have to be replaced by other types of location.

Considering environmental on-screen perspectives, we have seen numerous examples and trends within film and television series during the last decade that reflect critical climate conditions in society. This is of course also the case for factual television, including news, documentaries and factual entertainment. ‘Cli-fi’ has emerged as a new genre dealing with climate issues (Souch, 2020; Leyda, 2023), and there are many popular television series and feature films that include critical environmental elements in their storytelling to attract and engage the viewers. Drawing on theories about the Anthropocene and geopolitical screens (Saunders, 2021), it might be possible to distinguish between sustainability as popular content included for market-strategic reasons, and sustainability as a critical element in the stories, where the producer aims to challenge and change the viewer’s mindset and behaviour. There is no doubt that the creative sectors, including film and media, play a crucial role in shaping public perceptions, influencing green behaviours, and crafting narratives that have a wide audience reach and go on to impact public opinion and environmental awareness.

Within this context, I will introduce green drone visions as a niche field of research that could have the future potential to challenge and even change both off-screen conditions and on-screen aesthetics. Drones (Graae & Maurer, 2021) have become a ubiquitous, easy and cheap technology; as such they have become a pervasive element in global life, significantly impacting sectors such as the military, surveillance, agriculture and biology (Wich & Koh, 2018; Boyle, 2020; Cureton, 2020). The European drone market is anticipated to expand significantly, potentially worth €4.5 billion by 2030 and generating 145,000 new jobs (Teknologisk Institut, 2019; European Commission, 2022). Since the early 2000s, the accessibility of drones has revolutionised cinematic techniques, enabling filmmakers to capture expansive and dynamic shots that previously required much higher budgets and complex logistics. However, there is as yet no interdisciplinary research exploring the synergy between drone technology, film industry practices and representational impacts—particularly the ecocritical potential within filmmaking. Integrating drones into screen production requires careful consideration of several critical aspects—such as policies, privacy, the potential disruption of traditional roles (caused by, for example, artificial intelligence) and the environmental impact (Grønlund & Waade, 2024).

In this chapter I have shed light on various choices and questions involving locations in screen productions. Unlike many other elements in feature films and fictional television, such as storytelling, dramaturgy, acting, music and camera use, locations have typically been confined to tacit knowledge among cinematographers and directors: they have not received significant attention within film and television studies and theories. Following the location studies model, in which locations in screen productions encompass both on-screen features and off-screen production conditions (Hansen & Waade, 2017), my aim in this context has been to elaborate the implicit and explicit rationales for how locations have been considered over time. These have changed from representing a predominantly implicit rationale for ideas of cultural policy, public service and local colour, to more outspoken viewpoints and valuation of locations as a part of regional development, clustering within the screen industry and selling and marketing screen products as well as tourism destinations. More recently, I have argued, we are seeing a new agenda within screen productions, with locations being linked to an environmental consciousness, both on screen and in their production practices.

However, it is of course difficult to draw clear distinctions and historical categories, because these rationales represent diffuse cultural and implied ideas and values. These rationales may be recombined and expressed in various ways and they exist as parallel and competing values. Furthermore, a very important modification is the fact that the rationales I have discussed will vary depending on the specific media, political and societal reality in which they operate. First and foremost, it is crucial to consider whether screen productions are primarily publicly and nationally funded, or whether we are looking at more commercial and internationalised screen production conditions. The rationales for choosing and displaying locations in specific productions may also vary depending on the scale and size of the industry itself, and the film and television markets and distribution systems of which they are part. There may also be some significant differences between film and television productions. In this chapter, I have mainly drawn on my own work on Nordic television productions, funded and produced in a Nordic media welfare context (Syvertsen et al., 2014), and representing a small market and a minor language compared to the Anglophone television markets. Furthermore, I have referred to Nordic noir as a distinct cultural phenomenon and international media brand, one in which the Nordic locations have been a significant feature and selling point. The rationales and discussions may differ if we look at, for example, Indian, Turkish, or Canadian screen productions. This said, I also think that this discussion reflects some general tendencies that we can see across countries and cultures in which locations in screen productions have come to play a more distinct and explicit role, for example Nollywood, K-drama and film tourism in Brazil (Reijnders et al., 2024).

If we consider future research perspectives and potential in relation to locations in screen productions, I have three suggestions. Firstly, I would welcome international and comparative studies that look at locations both as on-screen features and as off-screen conditions, across countries, cultures and continents. Hansen and Re (2023) have recently published a book on Peripheral Locations in European TV Crime Series that does exactly this, and it would be interesting to see more research work along these lines. Combining textual analysis of locations in film and television series with empirical industry studies encompassing both quantitative and qualitative data, as the location studies model indicates, is time-consuming. If we aim to apply this methodology to international and comparative studies as well, considerable time and resources are needed. Nevertheless, studies of this kind bring significant new insights and values, both for academic research and for industry. Secondly, and a quite different approach to location studies that represents an activist and co-creative research agenda, could be to engage with specific screen productions and try to change, influence and inform location practices from within, and thus lead the place-making and co-creating location process. I have tried this in my own work on the site-specific television series production Hvide Sande (White Sand) (TV2, 2021), shot on the Danish west coast. Using a place-intervening research approach, I worked closely with local authorities and cultural institutions that had no previous experience within the field. My role was to guide the local partners to navigate and work with the production company and the broadcaster (Waade, 2021). This approach could be beneficial in studying sustainability in the screen industry and location practices in this regard. A third approach that could be of relevance to extend the location studies approach would be to look at various technologies, such as drones, to see how they change production practices and location imageries in screen productions. Furthermore, the location studies approach will also benefit from including more comprehensive studies of regional and national screen industry conditions—as exemplified by the current collection.