Buddy Filming Locations

Casper Kelly’s “Buddy” takes the cheery language of a 1990s children’s television program and pushes it into increasingly nasty territory. At the center is “It’s Buddy!,” a colorful show hosted by Buddy, a bright-orange talking unicorn who sings, plays and teaches lessons to a group of children. That carefully manufactured happiness begins to fracture when the children stop following his rules, revealing that Diamond City and Buddy’s clubhouse are considerably less innocent than they appear.

The horror comedy, starring Cristin Milioti, Delaney Quinn and Topher Grace, with Keegan-Michael Key, Michael Shannon and Patton Oswalt among its distinctive voices, is also a particularly interesting production from a location standpoint. Instead of moving between several states to create its real and fictional worlds, “Buddy” stayed in Northeast Ohio. Production began in July 2025 and used Brooklyn, Solon and Burton as its principal filming areas, with Greater Cleveland supplying virtually everything the movie needed.

Greater Cleveland, Ohio

“Buddy” was filmed in Greater Cleveland, and the production’s Ohio base was more important than merely providing a few exterior shots. Cleveland-based Low Spark Films was one of the companies behind the movie, while the area’s studios and suburban locations allowed the filmmakers to keep a production filled with puppets, practical effects and elaborate children’s-TV scenery relatively concentrated. The Greater Cleveland Film Commission has confirmed that the movie was shot in Northeast Ohio during the summer of 2025.

The decision also suited the movie’s unusual split personality. Grace’s life outside Buddy’s program needed to resemble a recognizable American suburban world, while “It’s Buddy!” required something much more artificial. Rather than trying to find a real location that already resembled a strange children’s show, Kelly’s team could build that environment inside a soundstage and use surrounding Cleveland communities when the story moved into reality.

Kelly later spoke positively about working in Cleveland, even though the demanding shooting schedule left little free time. He managed to visit places such as the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and a Cleveland Guardians game during the production. The director’s experience in the city became particularly notable because “Buddy” was his feature directing debut after his cult success with projects such as “Too Many Cooks.”

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TRG Multimedia, Brooklyn

The most important “Buddy” filming location was TRG Multimedia at 1 American Road, Suite 700, in Brooklyn, Ohio. The studio occupies space at the former American Greetings headquarters and became the production’s main home during filming. Local reporting describes “Buddy” as having been shot almost entirely at TRG, with producer Tyler Davidson explaining that the soundstage environment was essential because the filmmakers were recreating the look and atmosphere of children’s television from the 1990s.

TRG’s scale helps explain how much of the movie could be created there. The company operates a roughly 160,000-square-foot production facility containing a soundstage, more than 40 customizable standing sets, a large cyc wall, a two-story prop room and additional filmmaking facilities. Those resources gave Kelly’s team enough room to build the deliberately cheerful world surrounding Buddy rather than relying primarily on digital backgrounds.

That practical approach matters because the movie’s children’s-show setting needs to look physically believable before it becomes disturbing. Buddy’s clubhouse, colorful environments and the increasingly surreal territory surrounding the trapped children borrow the visual language of low-tech family television. Making those spaces on an actual stage allowed the production to work with real scenery, performers in suits, puppets and practical effects in the same frame.

The production was particularly puppet-heavy. Crew member Cedwan Hooks worked principally on Betty Bunny while also assisting with several other puppet characters, and Kelly has discussed the logistical difficulty of filming some of the movie’s puppet sequences. The controlled conditions at TRG were therefore useful for more than set construction. They gave the puppeteers, actors and camera team the precision needed for scenes that would have been far harder to stage on ordinary locations.

Solon, Ohio

The city of Solon, southeast of Cleveland, supplied an important part of the movie’s real-world environment. While TRG handled much of Buddy’s fabricated television universe, residential filming in Solon helped establish the life existing outside that strange program. Production reporting specifically connects Cristin Milioti and Topher Grace’s material with a private residence in the city, with additional exterior work completed around the surrounding area.

Milioti plays Grace, while Topher Grace plays her husband, Ben. Their portions of the story require a visual contrast with the exaggerated sets occupied by Buddy and the children. Solon’s established suburban neighborhoods provided that contrast without looking overly cinematic. Everything can initially appear routine, which makes the intrusion of Buddy’s increasingly warped world more effective.

The precise residential property has not been officially publicized, and there is little reason to identify a private family address merely because a production used it. Solon itself, however, is firmly associated with the shoot and is repeatedly listed alongside Brooklyn and Burton among the Northeast Ohio communities used for “Buddy.”

Schoolyard Studio, Burton

The production also traveled east to Burton, Ohio, where additional work was carried out at Schoolyard Studio. The production facility is located at 14510 North Cheshire Street, Burton, OH 44021, and operates from a property designed to provide filmmakers with soundstages, ready-made environments and production support under one roof.

Schoolyard Studio is particularly useful for movies because it contains established sets that can be adapted instead of constructed from scratch for every project. Its facilities include spaces designed to represent institutional environments such as hospital corridors, classrooms, locker rooms, police facilities and other interiors. For a production already working on a tight schedule, having such environments available can save valuable construction time.

Public location information does not clearly identify every finished “Buddy” scene that was filmed at Schoolyard, so assigning a particular hospital, classroom or other sequence to Burton would go beyond what has been confirmed. What is established is that Burton was part of the production footprint and that Schoolyard Studio hosted the movie.

The geography behind “Buddy” is therefore surprisingly compact. The candy-colored nightmare of “It’s Buddy!” was largely created inside a former corporate campus in Brooklyn, the more recognizable suburban world extended into Solon, and additional controlled production work took place in Burton. Instead of disguising famous landmarks as fictional places, Casper Kelly’s movie depended on Northeast Ohio’s less visible production infrastructure. That is fitting for a film built around television illusion: much of Diamond City never existed outside the soundstage at all.