Where Was Discontinued with Bruce Campbell Filmed?

Short answer: the host segments of Discontinued, every scene where Bruce Campbell talks you through another gloriously failed product, were shot at L.A. Castle Studios in Burbank, California, on our virtual production stage. The show never built a physical set for those scenes and never made a company move. It changed worlds instead.

The show, briefly

Discontinued (2023) is a docu-comedy series hosted by Bruce Campbell, created and directed by Brian Volk-Weiss and produced by The Nacelle Company, the team behind a string of pop-culture documentary hits. Each episode digs into products and fads that got pulled from the shelves, from fast-food experiments to toy-aisle legends, with Campbell steering the comedy between archival footage and expert interviews.

You can see the results yourself. Both of these were shot on our stage:

• Watch the Discontinued series trailer
• Watch the McDonald’s Arch segment

Why a comedy needs a virtual production stage

Here’s the production math that brought the show to Burbank. A series like Discontinued covers a different topic every few minutes. And comedy plays better when the host is somewhere, not floating in front of a graphics wash. Shot conventionally, that means either one generic set for the whole season, or location days and art-department builds for every topic. Both options cost time, money and jokes.

On our stage, the environment behind Campbell is a photoreal virtual set, rendered in Unreal Engine in real time and composited into the camera live using our patented CastleVision method, pioneered in 2007 and now protected by two U.S. patents. When the script moves from one discontinued product to the next, the world behind the host changes in minutes, not days. Real props dress the foreground; the rest of the set is virtual, final and in camera, what the director sees on the monitor is the shot.

For a comedy, that speed is creative fuel. More setups per day means more alts, more riffs, more takes of the bit that’s almost landing. And because the composite is live, Campbell could play off his surroundings instead of a blank green void, the timing reads on set, not months later in post.

One building, a season’s worth of locations

This is the same workflow we run for talk shows, game shows and scripted comedy with our virtual studio rental for film and TV: one crew, one lighting package, one address in Burbank. And a library of 250+ virtual sets to pull from, plus custom environments built to order. Newsrooms, diners, showrooms, offices, whole street scenes: for a series that needs a new backdrop every act break, the location scout is a menu.

If you’re weighing this approach for your own show, our Unreal Engine virtual production page walks through how the stage, the crew and the real-time pipeline fit together. And our video gallery has plenty more shot-here proof, Discontinued included.

Planning something similar?

Whether it’s a docu-comedy, a talk show or a branded series that needs to jump worlds on a schedule, this is what our studios in Burbank and Albuquerque are built for: host segments like these are the everyday work of our host wrap studio. Tell us about the project and we’ll quote it. Every show is priced to its needs.