I've been tracking this down for a while now and I've finally found confirmation of what I suspected: the current Google Maps imagery for Piha Beach in Aotearoa New Zealand was taken during setup for filming of Our Flag Means Death's Season 2, Episode 8!
[EDIT: Current on my desktop- unfortunately the later (not including our show) versions are showing up for a lot of mobile and desktop users, so read on for screenshots if you can't see them yourself!)
On the left is the north end of Piha Beach with the inn set. On the right is the south end carpark with the film crew base.
Why is that cool to me? Because it truly was a fleeting moment in time, no more than a handful of days of possibility, and yet we can see it right now on Google Maps, at least until they update it. As an archaeologist I love a moment preserved in time, and in this one you can even see the OFMD production crew on the beach and on the path. It's places and people caught in the flashbulb of this aerial image.
The specifics of how I pinned down the imagery and the date are in this Twitter thread, but the short version is, I was hunting for a better visual on the area immediately surrounding the inn while writing Full Fathom Five, and noticed that the carpark in particular seemed to line up exactly with images from the final day of filming.
The final day of filming overall was 13 December 2022, filming at Piha was on 12 December 2022, and this aerial image was taken on 11 December 2022.
I had already been through the first image to make a comparison to the aerial map and it looked like a match, but Google Maps had 2024 in their attribution. [Noting that I'd put 13 Dec on my image notes, but I'd got that tangled with the last day of filming in the Kumeū studio the next day, and it was 12 Dec on location].
Thankfully Google Earth came through with the actual date.
And I just took a further dig into Google Earth Pro, which allows you to switch between previous satellite images, and it confirms a date of 11 December 2022 for the north end image as well.
You can also compare this to a few months earlier in March 2022, right around the premiere of OFMD S1 (everything moved so fast in hindsight!) when there was no inn in that spot.
Which means we now know that for now, if you hop onto Google Maps (not Google Earth, because they have a different image for the north end that does come from 2024) and zing on down to Piha Beach, you can take a look at a preserved moment in time from the filming of S2Ep8.
You can hop straight to the inn here.
And straight to the parking lot here.
And remember to put the layers into Satellite mode to view the aerial imagery.
[ADDING A NOTE: in following the links through, people have found that the heavily shadowed 2024 image shows up in Google Maps on mobile (and some desktop versions as well) instead of the 2022 one where you can see the detail, so it looks like the 2022 version is possibly only visible on some iterations of Google Maps on desktop now, which is also one of the reasons why I'm recording it here. If you have the Google Earth Pro application on desktop you can switch between all the versions as well.]
Everything that's shown at the north end lines up with what we've seen both in the show and in behind the scenes content, all of which I delved into in this Twitter thread last month. That goes into a lot more detail about specifics, but the evidence is solid across the board.
The sandy path that runs beside the inn is a distinct feature seen in the show.
The peak that sits behind it, likewise (from Google Maps user uploads here and here).
The inn itself, and the way the path gives way to an unseen carpark, from Simone Nathan's TikTok video.
Based on all of that, it's easy to see that we've got our inn right here circled in red, preserved in that moment in time, even though it was no doubt taken down as soon as filming was done.
Prep looks like it took a couple of days before filming; filming was pretty much done in a day, according to an article at the time.
So, there you have it- it's a minor little thing and it won't be up forever, but for now you can hop into Google Maps and see an aerial view adjacent to the filming of S2Ep8 at Piha. The other beach scenes from Eps 1, 3 and 8 were filmed at Te Henga/ Bethells Beach.
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