My photo doesn’t do justice to how much Stephen Amell resembles a Jason Bourne-type action star. 
Of course I didn’t see him dressed as the Green Arrow or any of the many fight sequences, but fight coordinator James Bamford kept tweeting about how ripped Amell is and how kickass the fight scenes were. And I’ve heard stories of people being shot through their eyeballs. We’re not in Smallville anymore.
Surprisingly for a Hunger Games-esque pilot, The Selection is not about kids fighting each other to the death. Aimee Teegarden (Friday Night Lights) stars as a poor girl chosen by lottery to enter a fierce competition to marry the prince and become the next Queen of a war-torn nation far in the future. I didn’t see Amy Teegarden as America Singer, William Mosely as servant Aspen or Ethan Peck as Prince Maxim on set, but did visit all of their shooting locations.
On the first day of filming, The Selection set up a village market inside the Terminal City Ironworks complex in east Vancouver with Aimee Teegarden on set as young America. Scenes of America saying goodbye to her village were shot at the Britannia Heritage Shipyards in Steveston, captured beautifully by commerical photographer Clayton Perry in his The Selection photoset on Flickr.
To depict the war-torn country, The Selection went north on the Sea to Sky highway to the Squamish Municipal Airport for scenes of fighting with Royal forces on an airport runway. Scenes from the royal palace must have been filmed at Hycroft in Shaughnessy and at the Casa Mia mansion on SW Marine Drive in Vancouver. And of course, the selection itself took place inside the Orpheum Theatre, the one place I managed to photograph cast. That’s Peta Sergeant below. who plays the rebel leader. Hunger Games-mania could easily propel The Selection onto the CW schedule this fall.
Another pilot for The CW can only be described as meta. Matt Davis took time out of playing in-peril history teacher Alaric on The CW’s hit show The Vampire Diaries to be a blogger named Jeff investigating the rabid fans of horror TV show Cult, who have taken the series too literally. I found Davis on set in Victory Square on the first day of filming, looking too fine for a blogger, and on the last day of filming in Gastown’s The Alibi Room. Even if picked up, Cult will be a short, 13-episode series, leaving room for Davis to return to Vampire Diaries.
The CW medical drama pilot Emily Owens M.D. (formerly First Cut) has some buzz for its lead Mamie Gummer (Meryl Streep’s daughter), who stars as social nerd and new doctor Emily,who finds life at Denver Memorial Hospital a lot like high school, where the popular students are people like former model Justin Hartley (the Green Arrow on Smallville) as a surgical intern. Several Vancouver locations have doubled as Denver Memorial Hospital from Burnaby Central Secondary School to Riverview Hospital in Coquitlam to the main entrance of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre at the University of British Columbia below.
The fifth CW pilot to film here is based on an Israeli time-travel musical romance which ran for 200 half-hour episodes. Craig Horner (Legend of the Seeker) is the dead music icon Joey Dakota pictured in the prop memorial placed outside the iconic Marine Building downtown. A young filmmaker Maya, played by Amber Stevens (Greek), is making a documentary about his life and somehow travels back in time and falls in love with her subject, only to be thrown back to the present. She then struggles to find a way back to her love and prevent his death.
