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CONTINUUM Digitally Explodes Arthur Erickson-Designed Building in Season One Finale

On Continuum’s season finale entitled Endtime, Rachel Nichols’s Kiera Cameron and Erik Knudsen’s Alec Sandler race to prevent a 2012 terrorist attack which defines the future, set off by Tony Amedola’s Liber8 leader Kagame, who’d been sent back in time to do exactly this. I saw them film Nichols and Knudsen running into the iconic Arthur Erickson-designed building at 1075 West Georgia Street in Vancouver in early May in take after take. Zooming in, I could see them in conversation with someone in a police uniform but never suspected it was Tony Amendola’s Kagame. Watching the finished product last night, I wondered if the late Arthur Erickson would be pleased or annoyed to see his building digitally destroyed like this on screen. I think he would be pleased.

Of course Continuum didn’t actually demolish the building. They built an amazing set with styrofoam concrete blocks and other debris in the Concord Pacific Courtyard next to CBC Vancouver — truly stop-and-stare set design.

Rachel Nichols and Erik Knudsen did have a big green screen scene of them running out of the building at 1075 West Georgia and leaping onto stunt mats out of the way of the explosion to come but Continuum filmed the aftermath of them emerging from the rubble at Concord Courtyard Pacific below.

Brrr. It was too cold out for the black cat suit. Add smoke machines blowing smoke, wind machines blowing office paper, background performers covered in ash and you have the aftermath of a devastating terrorist attack.