It was so obvious that they were trying to make do with limited sets and locations. Did any scene have a master shot? Too bad.
shareI only seen it once, have to check out the production values next time. I believe they used an abandoned phychiatric hospital in Austin , TX the Parkland hospital scenes.
shareI don't think the budget or locations hampered anything.
Dealey Plaza is Dealey Plaza. I understand the locals complain all the time about it being closed for filming one JFK assassination reenactment after another. A bigger budget can't change how Dealey Plaza looked on November 22, 1963. Love Field was an airport on a Texas plain, and a bigger budget isn't going to change how Air Force One of 1963 looked. Oswald shot Officer Tippit on a residential street in Dallas that looked like any residential street in Anywhere USA. Those are the outdoor locations for the major events of November 22, 1963 and its aftermath. Unless you include JFK's funeral procession, and there's plenty of archival footage of that.
Most of the other scenes take place indoors: Marina Oswald's room at the Paine house, the interior of the Book Depository, the boarding house where Oswald lived, the hallways and trauma rooms of Parkland, the interior of Dallas Police Headquarters. How can a bigger budget change the looks of those locations?
Put another way, the made for cable movie Killing Kennedy was released for the 50th anniversary of the assassination like Parkland, and there was an old 1977 TV movie titled Ruby and Oswald. The three movies focused on different aspects of the JFK assassination, but they all had the same look and feel except for the older cinematographic quality and aspect ratio of the 1977 movie. You could probably intersplice the three into one movie, and if not for the actors and the aspect ratio, probably nobody could tell which scenes were from which movie.
FWIW, I consider Parkland the best of the three in terms of what it focused on.